


I Have Faith in Nights

by angelfishofthelord



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel Grace headcanons, Angel Wings, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Castiel Needs a Hug (Supernatural), Demon Blood, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Heavy Angst, Hell Trauma, Hurt Castiel (Supernatural), Hurt/Comfort, If Supernatural (TV) Were on HBO, Injured Castiel (Supernatural), It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, POV Third Person Omniscient, Psychological Torture, S12 AU, Season/Series 12, Self-Esteem Issues, Team Free Will (Supernatural), This story gets dark, Trauma, Trauma From Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), Whump, and doesnt get one for awhile, everyone's traumatized ok, like so much of it I'm not even kidding, warning for graphic depictions of PAST violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:22:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 38,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28516356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelfishofthelord/pseuds/angelfishofthelord
Summary: What if Castiel never made it back to the Bunker after Toni banished him? What if Dean and Mary rescued Sam from the BMoL but there was still no sign of the angel? Not for days. Weeks. Months.Until.They find him in a warehouse in the south of North Carolina.It’s been six months and sixteen days.
Relationships: Castiel & Claire Novak, Castiel & Dean Winchester, Castiel & Mary Winchester, Castiel & Sam Winchester
Comments: 112
Kudos: 116





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set in early s12 with one major difference: Cas never made it back to the Bunker after Toni banished him. So Mary is back, Sam is rescued from the BMoL, and Rowena banishes rockstar!Lucifer into the bottom of the ocean. But Castiel is gone. Until they finally find him.
> 
> Fair warning this story does have a happy ending (although not in the conventional sense) but if you're looking for the light at the end of the tunnel this is going to be a very VERY long winding tunnel. 
> 
> Lots of love to [galaxythreads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyThreads/pseuds/GalaxyThreads) who beta read this with so much diligence and patience and helped it become the story I'm proud of today. It's quite a different style than I've written in before but I wanted to challenge myself and I ended up stretching myself to edges I didn't know I had. I think I might have broken myself writing this. But it's worth it.

They find him in a warehouse in the south of North Carolina.

It’s the thirty-first warehouse they’ve looked in across eight different states.

It’s been six months and sixteen days; six broken ribs between the two of them, half as many blown-out tires, and a dozen different failed locating spells. They’ve lost count of the number of times they’ve dialed for help to the king of Hell and his witch mother. They’ve drawn enough sigils on splintered doors and ceiling beams and peeling wallpaper that their fingers still form the patterns out of habit in their sleep. Their elbows and knees wear the bruises of demons and vampires and ghouls and walls they’ve run into over the past twenty-six weeks. Sam has blood under his fingernails that can’t be scrubbed clean and Dean has skin peeling from his knuckles that never completely heals.

But they find him.

Sitting in the middle of the floor, barefoot in a circle of cursive blood.

Knees pulled up to his chest.

Trench coat tail flapping in the breeze.

His name leaves their lips at the same time. It’s not a cry; it’s a choir in a single syllable, written in thousands of prayers prayed during sleepless nights lying on itchy motel mattresses and quick naps taken in the back seat of the Impala; between interrogating shackled and writhing demons and while salting and burning ghost corpses. 

“Cas!”

He lifts his head to look at them with eyes glassy as a frozen sea. His arms remain curled around his knees and he holds their gaze for less than a second before looking away.

Their running footsteps skitter to a stop at the edge of the circle, both of them staring down at the markings in dried blood haloing the angel.

Sam nudges Dean. “We need to break the sigils. It’s Enochian binding.”

Enochian has become a second language to Sam in the past half year. He memorized the entire dictionary of spells found in the Bunker; he learned to write those shapes over and over until they seeped into the pixels of his dreams.

They try holy water from the flask and scraping with the angel blade but nothing works to remove the sigils. Dean dashes back to the Impala parked down the road and comes back swinging a sledgehammer.

Sam is still there, kneeling down outside the circle and talking to the seemingly oblivious angel. “We need to break the sigils,” he repeats, looking up at Dean. “I don’t think he knows we’re here.” 

At the first blow of the hammer into the concrete Castiel dips his head down between his kneecaps, wrapping his arms around his bent legs for an added seal of protection. _“_ It’s hurting him, _”_ Sam mouths over the roar of the pounding hammer and Dean shakes his head because he can’t stop. If they don’t break the sigils they can’t get him out. They can’t pull him into their arms and take him home and make sure everyone who ever laid a hand on him tastes grave dirt for generations of eternity.

When the red lines finally crack Dean drops the tool to the ground with a spinning clatter. They both rush into the circle and almost pull him apart in their attempt to both envelop him and check him for injuries. There’s enough blood on his clothes to fill a kiddie pool, but it’s all dried, caked in shades of brown. The soles of his feet are covered in a map of blisters oozing pus and Dean notices discoloring around his ankles like he had been hung from high up. The only visible wounds they find are two jagged lines running down the angel’s calves. They look like they're at least a few days old, but shimmers of blue-white grace still pulse from the congealed blood.

Sam cups Castiel’s face in those giant hands of his and looks into his eyes, repeating his name like it's a thread to follow out of the labyrinth.

Castiel blinks but doesn’t make a sound.

“Sam. Sammy.” Dean stills, rising to his feet. “Look.”

His brother follows the line of his pointed finger to the ground around their feet. In the waning afternoon light it’s hard to distinguish the blackened shapes there from the crawling shadows. It takes a second for Sam to recognize the charred stains and when he does he can’t stop the strangled sound of horror grating his throat.

“Are those more sigils? Are they blocking his grace?” Dean’s voice is wild with rage.

“No.” Sam bends down, gingerly splaying his trembling fingers into the frayed outline of ashes. “They’re feathers.”


	2. Two

They find him and they lose him at the same time.

Castiel sits in the back of the Impala with back pressed straight against the seat cushion, hands on his knees, and eyes positioned like sniper beams ahead. He doesn’t answer any of their questions and barely reacts to the call of his name. Sam has two phones in his hand, dialing between Crowley and Rowena. 

They had gone to North Carolina in the first place because of one of Rowena’s spells; after months of turning up nothing she finally got a response to the spell she cast. Not a specific location on the angel--God forbid it be that easy--but when she cast it the backlash she received was akin to “a barrier, you might call it,” Crowley had told them a few weeks ago. “Someone’s trying to keep prying eyes away.”

The area of the backlash stretched over almost the entire state; Sam and Dean had been spending the past few weeks combing through town after town while checking the news for which areas had any signs of suspicious activity. It felt like endlessly crawling through a 53,800 square mile haystack.

“They’ll be coming after him,” Dean says into the windshield. “They wouldn’t have just left--get Rowena to see if she can track angels that aren’t Cas and see if any are on our ass. And get Crowley--”

“Dean, I know,” Sam snaps. He doesn’t mean the bite in his voice but he’s too exhausted to reign it in.

Dean grunts at the car coming up close to cut them off to get ahead in the lane. His fingers wrap around the steering and he swerves a little more sharply than he needs to. He wants to rip the wheel off and and smash it -over the head of--he doesn’t know _who_. Who did this. Who will be at the end of the blade or bullet he’s going to put through them and he _will_ , he tells himself, trying to calm the rising fury in his chest. He will.

But first they need to get Castiel far, far away from that decrepit warehouse.

They stop at a motel for the night, halfway between hell and home. Sam goes to the front desk to get a room and Dean ducks into the backseat with a water bottle. When he hands it to Castiel the angel takes it, allowing precisely three mouthfuls to slide down his throat before he gives it back. Dean goes around to the trunk and pulls out a pair of clean clothes and the one pair of spare shoes from his duffle bag. There are a few people milling around the parking lot and Dean doesn’t want to have to answer any questions about the barefoot man in a blood-drenched trenchcoat .

Castiel touches the hem of the wrinkled t-shirt and jeans cautiously and then resumes his stiff position. “No,” he says.

His voice sounds like glass being pushed through the hole of a sieve.

“Cas…” Dean reaches out a hand to rest on his shoulder, searching for his friend’s eyes. "It’s just for tonight, I’ll wash the coat or find a laundromat and you can wear it again tomorrow.”

Castiel looks blankly at him, prompting Dean to ask the question that’s been nipping at the back of his mind. “Do you know--do you remember who we--who I am?”

The angel turns away from him. “Dean,” he sighs.

Dean exhales in relief. “Damn, you had me worried there for a second, buddy. Yeah,” he slides his arm all the way around and pulls Castiel a little closer. He can’t quite figure out the monotone in Cas’ voice and the complete lack of excitement at being reunited but he figures that his friend is still in some stage of shock. “We’re gonna get you home, Cas, we’re gonna get you safe. And then we’re gonna find out who did this to you.”

Castiel turns to face him with icy orbs of blue.

“You did.”

Dean’s fingers cramp as they twist in the fabric of the coat. “Cas--we didn’t--we’re not--” he feels sick even having to deny it. _“What?”_

Castiel goes rigid, arms plastered tightly to his sides. His stony gaze lingers on Dean a second longer before he pulls away brusquely.

When Sam gets back to the car he sees the backseat door is left wide open. Castiel is still sitting there, staring at the windshield in front of him. Sam goes around the side and finds his brother kneeling over in the grass, mouth too full of vomit to explain why.


	3. Three

They find a small mark below the base of his chin.

It’s barely noticeable, almost melded into his flesh and hardly the size of a thumbnail. Castiel sits motionless on the motel bed while Dean takes a photo of the marking and Sam cleans the broken blisters on his feet and then swaddles them in long white strips of gauze.

He still hasn’t healed himself, both brothers observe with a glance to each other. The only evidence of his grace remaining was when Sam tried again to insist he change out of the blood-soaked clothes. Castiel blinked, returning his pants, dress shirt, and trenchcoat back to an impeccable state. They even smell freshly cleaned, in contrast to grime and stains still seeped into his skin.

Dean texts Mary, telling her that they should arrive home tomorrow and that Castiel is with them and "alive". It's the only honest reassurance he can give her right now. He digs out a felt-tipped marker from his duffle bag and starts drawing sigils in the corners of the faded sunflower wallpaper of the room. They still haven't figured out who Castiel’s captors were or if they're on their tail so Dean wards the room against both angels and demons. 

Out of the corner of his eye he sees Sam hovering around Castiel, trying to talk to him as if the right combination of soothing words can unlock the hallucination--or whatever it is that his mind might be trapped in. Sam even suggested it might be some kind of dreamlike state, like a djinn's poison. But Castiel hasn't even tried to probe the edges of his reality, hasn't even questioned their presence once. This isn't like anything Dean’s seen before. This is--

_You did._

_You did this._

Sam bends down and rolls up Castiel's pants leg. “They’re not leaking grace anymore,” he says, patting the wounds there with a piece of gauze. He flicks a look up at his brother. “I don’t think he’s up for a shower but maybe help get him cleaned up a bit. I’ll start checking the lore and send Rowena this marking and see if she recognizes it. It looks almost...Enochian?" He grabs the keys from the table. "I'm gonna get some more books from the car."

“And grab us some grub,” Dean says, going over and putting an arm around Castiel to help him stand. "I saw a Gas-n-Sip around the corner."

Castiel throws his touch off and stalks off towards the bathroom, his body lurching unsteadily as his bandaged feet press into the cold panels of the floor.

“Cas, don’t be a stubborn ass,” Dean chides, habitually, before he remembers.

_You did._

Dean freezes in place, arms hanging at his side. He can feel the pull ripping at his chest, the urge to go after Castiel warring with the knowledge that his very presence might be making his friend suffer.

“Go after him,” comes Sam’s gentle remonstrance. “Maybe he just needs time to remember.”

The motel door closes loudly behind his brother and Dean makes himself put one foot after the other and propel his body towards the bathroom. He hesitates at the the threshold, seeing that Castiel is already sitting on the edge of the bathtub, hands placed over his knees in the exact same posture he maintained the entire car ride here.

“You stink,” Dean grins weakly, a strained attempt that elicits only a blank stare.

Grabbing a towel from the metal rack Dean busies himself with wetting it in the sink. The cold water runs sharply over his fumbling hands and he keeps his eyes down on the soaking wet fabric. He’s not afraid of Castiel. He’s not terrified of how absolutely still the angel is, the way his face is stripped of emotion in the same visage like when he was under Naomi’s control. He’s not scared that any touch given him might feel like the bruise of his torturer. He’s _not_.

Finally, he wrings the towel out and turns around. He forces himself to look at Castiel, to really _look_ at him. As he moves a few inches closer and notices a faint rim of discoloration peeking out from under the hem of his shirt collar. 

“Cas. I need to--I need to take off your shirt. I need to get you cleaned up, okay? It won’t hurt.” 

Two solemn blue eyes shift from their position of staring at the doorway and it stings when they face him. Cas, his friend and brother, never looked at him like that. Castiel, the soldier and weapon of Heaven, did. 

Then Castiel’s eyes fall to the towel crumpled in Dean’s right hand and the ghost of a quiver darts across his features. It’s so brief that Dean almost doesn’t notice it.

Almost.

Castiel pushes away Dean’s outstretched hand and undoes the first two buttons of the shirt himself. He peels the collar back and lifts his chin up, exposing the vein of his bobbing throat. “How much are you going to take this time?” he asks. 

Dean squints at what he thought was discoloration on the base of Castiel’s neck, only to realize that it’s not bruising. They’re scars. Tiny individual scarring in the shape of a pinprick’s dot, all collected into a mass that spreads down across his collarbone. He nudges the lapel of the shirt aside to see how far it goes and then pulls back immediately as soon as Castiel starts speaking again.

“You shouldn’t take too much. It makes it harder for me to regenerate it. That much longer between your next extraction.”

Castiel’s eyes are pinned to the ceiling, but his stare is too intense to be inconsequential. He’s trying to look away from what’s happening. What he thinks is happening.

“What did they do to you?” Dean whispers.

The response is immediate. Castiel snaps his head down and levels a heated glare at Dean. “You always ask the same questions. Do you truly think the result will be any different? I will never tell you where Sam Winchester is.”

Dean tastes bile welling up again. “I-I’m not…” he stammers weakly. “Cas, I’m not--”

Castiel arches his neck and waits there, fingers holding his shirt wide to bare himself open. “Just take the grace,” he says, wetting his lips. “Quickly.” His jaw is set and eyes re-positioned to the above. His toes curl down, bracing against the tiled floor and his other hand clenches the edge of the bathtub in anticipation of agony.

Dean rams his knee against the toilet bowl as he stumbles back, away from the very person he should be going to. Rescuing. Delivering. But he can’t, because he knows now why he recognized that look in Castiel’s eyes: the steel glimmer of a soldier. Not a soldier of Heaven, though; a soldier for them. A soldier protecting them, at the cost of himself.

He thinks of a time when the angel looked at them brightly, arm extended, _always happy to bleed for the Winchesters,_ and his fingers bend into a fist. He needs to hit something, anything. Mostly himself. 

_You did._

The words come back into his head, this time screaming with the reproach of his own voice.

_You did this, Dean Winchester._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a long internal debate about whether or not motel bathrooms have bathtubs. Americans tell me if I'm wrong


	4. Four

They find Crowley outside the Bunker’s door when they arrive the next day.

Dean has barely pulled to a stop before Sam is already clambering out and rushing towards where Mary is standing behind Crowley with a gun trained at his temple. 

“Hello boys,” Crowley grins. He waves with the hand she doesn’t have twisted around his back. 

“What do you want?” Dean bristles, coming up with a hand on Castiel's shoulder. He stands a little in front, as if to shield the angel from the demon.

Mary lowers her weapon immediately and moves to his side. “Castiel,” she says in hushed wonder.

They’ve never met before, Dean remembers belatedly. He and Sam had been building up a portrait of the angel to her, keeping him alive in those six months by telling Mary stories of their adventures past, of him joining him on their hunts and all the catastrophes he survived with them. But seeing an actual angel for the first time is still a breathless moment, no matter how well one’s been prepared for it. She stares a little, mouth slightly open before her instincts kick in.

“Is he alright?”

Dean doesn’t have time to answer that. “Can you get him inside? I’ll be down in a minute after--” he nods in the direction of Crowley-- “we deal with this.”

Mary nods, carefully tucking an arm around Castiel and Dean notices how he doesn’t flinch away from her touch. He watches them shuffle in tandem down the steps before the voice of the demon still lingering outside makes him turn around.

“I know I’m not on the guest list for the ‘welcome Feathers home’ party,” Crowley begins, digging in his suitcoat’s pocket. “Let me just show you my invite.” He pulls out a piece of paper and hands it to Sam. It’s a photo of the warehouse where they found Castiel the day before, an image zeroed in on the sigils they had broken up. “I did get your calls, by the way, but I was a little busy following up a lead of my own. Which lead me back to here.” A long crooked fingernail taps the glossy paper, right on the red line of the cracked sigil. “That’s Enochian binding.”

“We knew that.” Sam frowns and then glances up at Crowley who’s still standing there. “I’m guessing that’s not all," Sam says flatly. “You don't care about angel business. This has something to do with you. Something to do with Hell. What else is special about those sigils?”

Crowley tucks his hands in his pockets and sighs before answering. “Demon blood.”

The picture falls out of Sam’s hand, fluttering a way down to the grass below his feet. It’s uneven yellowed grass, never trimmed and half dead from lack of watering. He feels his mouth go dry as he forces the word out. _“What?”_

Crowley points at the photo lying on the ground. “It’s not _just_ a binding sigil, Moose. It’s a pact. Demons and angels working together to keep your choir boy inside.”

Immediately there’s the demon blade at Crowley’s throat and an angel blade at his ribs, all courtesy of Dean. Sam doesn’t even wonder how his brother got armed so quickly. He just steps around the two of them and leans into Crowley’s face.

“Did you know?” Sam asks, voice low and half directed at Dean to stab the demon if the answer is anything close to yes.

“Of course not!” Crowley sputters. “Do you take me for an idiot? I wouldn’t lay a hand on your halo.”

Dean lowers the angel blade, but keeps the demon knife pressed against Crowley’s jugular. “Then what _do_ you know?”

Crowley steps back, smoothing out his suit with a huff of irritation. “A rumor is all I’ve got, courtesy of the handful of whining demons I’ve been chatting with. I’m told that certain rogue demons teamed up with the halo squad to make dear Castiel find his big brother for them.”

 _Big brother…_ Sam and Dean look at each other before the realization hits them. 

Lucifer.

A shiver ripples through the sheen of sweat on his neck and Sam bends down to pick up the photo to hide his shaking hands. The shiny paper slips through his fumbling fingers and he grabs at it again. 

“Lucifer,” Dean echoes and shakes his head. “No, no, you said he’s at the bottom of the ocean. You said Rowena--and Cas--Cas said he wouldn’t--they were looking for _us_. They wanted him to give us up.”

“Makes sense,” Crowley shrugs, gaze sliding over to Sam. “Where else could they get a custom-made vessel for the ol’ boy?”

He disappears before the swing Sam throws ever even lands.


	5. Five

They find Mary hiding in the kitchen.

She tries to feign normalcy, head bowed and hands splashing under the flow of the faucet, but when she glances up at the sound of her name, Dean sees it immediately.

“What’s wrong? Did Crowley hurt you?” His hands instinctively clench as he steps closer, body angled to defend her even though Sam is the only other person in the room. 

“No, it’s nothing,” Mary mumbles, ducking past her son to grab for a hand towel. Sam starts to pass her the towel hanging off the oven handle but then stills. With a gentle grip he turns her wrist, revealing the black smears etched into her palms.

“Mom, what happened?” Sam asks and she lowers her gaze to the ground.

“It’s nothing, it’s just…Castiel.” 

Sam and Dean exchange a wordless, pained conversation.

Cas. He _didn’t_. He wouldn’t have.

But then he doesn’t seem to fully recognize who they are right now.

Dean swallows hard and makes himself say the words. “Did he--he…did he hurt you?”

“No, no, he didn’t.” Mary takes the towel from Sam and starts rubbing it hard against her hands. The black smears only deepen the more she scrubs. “I helped him into the infirmary and then--he suddenly became frantic. He started going on about Lucifer and some kind of spell?”

Sam’s face pales. “Crowley. He said they wanted to use Cas to find Lucifer.”

“I tried to leave,” Mary bumbles on, her voice breaking at the edges, “but he grabbed my hand and told me he could give it to me, something I didn't understand what, he just--he kept begging with me not to pull them out and then--” she puts down the towel, holding up her palms towards them “--I put up a hand to stop him and he yanked at something in the air. Suddenly I was holding a handful of feathers.”

She sucks in a breath and looks away. “They fell apart as soon as I touched them. I tried to pick up the pieces, I tried but they all turned into ash.”

“Feathers.” Panic clouds Dean’s voice. “Sam, remember the floor of the warehouse.” He presses a thumb into Mary’s blackened palm. “It looked just like this all.”

“They took his feathers?” Mary gasps, a shaking hand pressed to her lips. She looks almost faint and Sam thinks that this is the worst way possible for her to be introduced to angels.

“We don’t know exactly what happened yet, but we’ll find out, okay?” Sam’s voice is firm as he looks between his mother and brother, trying to be a ballast amid the rising tide. “We’ll find a way to help him, Mom, we will.” He moves forward, putting an arm around her and she sags against his side, letting him guide her out of the kitchen. “It’s okay, it’s not your fault. Let’s get some rest before we figure out what to do.”

They walk out. 

Dean doesn’t. 

It takes him a minute to realize that he’s still standing there by the sink, next to a soiled dish towel inked with the color of sacrificial feathers.

Six months.

Six months of not knowing where Castiel was, if he was dying somewhere in heaven or hell or in between. They didn’t know if they would find an empty vessel or just an imprint of wings or even any physical remains of him at all.

Six months of keeping themselves sane and barely afloat by imagining this very scenario: Castiel, home in the bunker, safe and surrounded by the people who loved him.

But now that vision of hope has been infiltrated, invaded by a new foe he doesn’t know the name of.

All he knows is that there are angel feathers on the towel in his kitchen.

The coffee maker sits beside the towel, the half-filled cold pot looking at him with a warped brown grin and the twinkling eyes of the ceiling lights above and Dean can’t stop himself from lunging at it.

Sam pauses at the cusp of the hallway, listening to the commotion of glass shattering and the rising chorus of kitchen objects hurled against walls and cupboard doors. He puts a hand on Mary’s arm, stopping her from going to him. No one can put that many pieces back together.


	6. Six

They find another marking between his toes.

Over the past forty-eight hours Sam has been studying through the lens of black coffee and the honey yellow glow of the library lamps. His eyelids are so strained that they ache when he blinks. But he’s finally figured out at least one part of the marking: the lines in the circle under Castiel’s chin aren’t lines. They’re tiny Enochian symbols in a pattern of three.

“Mom said she already checked when she changed his bandages,” Dean says in response to Sam’s idea that there might be two more circles somewhere on the angel.

“Then you go and look again.” Sam says irritably. He glances up, squinting involuntarily at the bright glare of the ceiling lights. He also notices that Dean is still standing there, fists propped determinedly on the table. Ever since the incident in the motel bathroom his brother has been trying to avoid interacting with the angel. Instead he’s refocused his energy on finding Castiel’s captors; Sam has heard him on the phone with other hunters, asking them to report if they see any traces of angelic or demonic activity; he’s heard him swearing threats at Crowley and relentlessly bargaining with Rowena, promising her ancient spellbooks from the Bunker’s archives if she helps track down the angels who did this.

“She says she needs a name for a locating spell,” Dean had grumbled to Sam when he passed him in the kitchen that morning, voice hoarse and left hand gripped around the neck of a bottle. “ _‘Why don’t you ask him for a name’_ , she said.” 

Sam holds back a sigh and closes the book. “Fine, I’ll help you find it. It shouldn’t take long, it’s probably somewhere near the first one, or on his back.”

It turns out to be in between his toes.

Castiel remains unmoved as Sam angles his phone around his big toe, trying to get a clear picture of the second marking. He’s been sitting on the infirmary bed still as a stone ever since they brought him there; the only movement he engages in is allowing them to nudge him around when they need to change his bandages. The blisters on his feet still haven’t healed and his eyes are now rimmed with dark halos of fatigue. Sam tried asking on the first day if he still had his grace, and Mary has been repeatedly trying to get him to drink water or eat some soup, all of which has been refused with impenetrable silence.

Sam leans in a little closer to inspect the lines on the toe marking. There seems to be one extra line in the circle than the one under his chin, and the edge of his phone rams into Castiel’s toenail when he flips the phone around.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters, looking up for a second.

It’s an action of habit; you bump into someone’s toe, you apologize. But in his current state Castiel makes every inconsequential interaction feel weighted by an anchor around the neck. He doesn’t respond at all; in fact it feels like a deliberate lack of acknowledgement as his gaze fixates on the wall ahead.

“These scars--I don’t understand, if he still has his grace why isn’t he healing?” Dean is whispering behind him, pulling up the pant leg on the right and Sam catches a glimpse of a thin white scar ribboning the bone below the ankle.

It’s too faint, too uneven to be the mark of shackles or rope. The color is almost melded with the hue of his skin, appearing more like a seam than a scar.

Sam gently pushes a fingertip against the line, confirming his guess that the skin there is smooth. Unbroken. Natural healing would leave a coarseness, a reminder of the body’s effort to repair the damage. “It’s been healed,” he answers himself aloud. “By an angel. But why is there still a mark then?”

“You waited too long to reattach it that time,” Castiel says to the wall and both boys almost jump up. They need to get used to this, the way he deliberately feigns detachment, but is in fact carefully tracking every sound and movement in the room. It’s a strategy to minimize drawing attention to himself but to also allow him to intercept whenever he deems it necessary.

He’s a soldier, Sam reminds himself. A soldier who still believes he’s in enemy hands.

“They wanted to let it rot until gangrene set in. You let them, even though Maribel warned you not to.” Castiel's tone is steady and utterly unaffected by the reality of his words. “I told you this vessel can only handle being dismembered so many times. Try to keep that mind next time you hand me over to them.”

Sam does his best to ignore the panicked breathing of Dean beside him. He has a theory now, one that’s running like a freight train through his mind and he needs to keep it on track. Moving to the other side he lifts up the other pant leg and sees the same line there, this time above the ankle. Castiel’s eyes make no move to follow him as he steps up and peels the sleeve of his trenchcoat up on both arms. The angel has repeatedly refused to change his clothes into something more comfortable; he wears his dress shirt, suit jacket, and coat at all times and maintains their cleanliness while ignoring the rest of his physical state.

Sam sees a third line below the right elbow and another scar bracelet around his left wrist.

It seems random. Angels are instruments of relentless precision.

This work is...sloppy. Sam hates that the word just rose to mind about torture marks on his friend.

“I don’t understand why you choose to work with _them_ ,” Castiel drones on, his head tilting ever so slightly to direct his monotone at Dean who’s at the end of the bed rewrapping the bandages around his feet. “You don’t intend to fulfill your part of the deal, and they know better than to trust you. However you think you can outsmart them will never succeed. Long before I’m dead you will both destroy each other.”

The words should be a threat, but there’s no ammunition behind them. It's little more than words of habit, like saying sorry when you bump someone’s toe. Dean figures that Castiel has recited these same lines to his captors so many times that he’s just going through the motions of defiance.

Sam looks at the markings again and realizes that angels don’t tear people apart bodily. They go for the mind, the tender crevices where the heart and soul lie and aim their warfare _there_. The only angel who ever fixated on destruction of the person in mind and soul as well as flesh and blood was Lucifer. He took people apart for the pure delight he derived from the physicality of bones splintering and flesh ripping.

It’s too late to stop himself from curling his nails into his palm. Sam clenches his fist, leaving a row of shallow crescents in his palm. He can’t linger in those memories; he needs to focus on Castiel. What happened to Castiel.

“It’s demons,” Sam says when they step outside a few minutes later. His back presses to the hallway wall, cool tiles against the sheen of sweat under his shirt. “Demons did that.”

“Did what?” Dean seems to be confused, as if Castiel hadn’t just narrated an incident where his foot was ripped off his leg and left to rot before being put back together.

Sam draws his eyebrows together. “You heard him. There are similar marks on his hands and elbows. The angels gave him to the demons to…oh god, Dean.” His stomach churns thickly. “Dean, he said ‘ _that time.’_ They did it to him more than once.”

His brother’s eyes widen. “They-they-they hacked him up and put him back together over and--and--” He turns around, pressing a fist to his mouth and pushing his other hand against the wall as if to steady himself.

“We need to write down everything we know,” Sam blurts out, letting his mind rush into steps, lists, practicalities. “We need to divide it between what the angels are doing and what the demons are doing. Maybe then we can figure out a pattern for where they are.” 

“Okay.” Dean takes a deep breath before facing Sam again. “We know the angels are taking his feathers and his grace.” 

“They also want to find Lucifer.”

“Both of them do. I get why the demons want Lucifer back to rule hell, but what do the angels want with him?”

Sam thinks of when Castiel and--Lucifer--went to Heaven to convince the angels to fight against the Darkness. Castiel was there, surrounded by every member of his kin who detest him and possessed by an archangel they hated even more. “Maybe…justice?” he wonders. “Do they want to punish Lucifer? Or keep him locked up in Heaven?” He backtracks a little, pursing his lips in a frown. “You said Cas told you they were taking his grace?”

“Yeah, basically.” There’s clearly more to the interaction that Dean doesn’t want to elaborate on and Sam lets it slide because the corner pieces are suddenly fitting into the puzzle frame.

“Oh,” he breathes faintly. “They’re trying to track Lucifer with it.”

Dean looks up in horror. Sam tries to explain, but somehow ends up quoting the exact words Castiel once told him. “ ‘And the departed shall remain and the remains shall be the departed.’ ”

“Poetry, Sammy? Now?”

“It means an angel leaves behind some grace when they leave a vessel.” He pauses to collect his thoughts. “They must be taking his feathers to use in some way to strengthen the spell. When it doesn’t work they keep trying again and again.”

“They’re _torturing_ him,” Dean snaps, pounding a fist to the gray tiles behind him. “They’re letting demons rip his limbs off, they’re--”

“Dean, I know. But if we figure out why they’re doing it, it gives us some direction for finding a trail--maybe--to find them.”

“He doesn't know--he doesn't even know I’m alive.” Dean's breath catches and suddenly he's standing in front of Sam, stabbing a finger against his chest. “At the motel. He said ‘I will never tell you where _Sam Winchester_ is.’ ” 

One, two, three times the fingernail digs into his shirt before Dean drops his hand. “Then he sat there and told me to take his grace. He didn’t even try to stop me or fight. If he thinks we’re torturing him, why won’t he fight back? He should be throwing punches at us every time we step a foot into the room. Why won’t he fight?”

Sam opens his mouth to vocalize some kind of placating phrase but nothing comes out. All he can hear is _‘I will never tell you where Sam Winchester is.’_ His thoughts crystalize into icicles and every increasing second stabs deeper into him. Six months of brutality at the hands of his own kin and desecration by mortal enemies, all to protect him. An angel standing up against the gauntlet blows to shield _him_.

If he takes as much as one breath he knows he will shatter, so Sam presses his lips together tighter and says nothing.

Dean shakes his head and walks off, probably to find another bottle to wash away the sting of this conversation. He rounds the corner of the hallway muttering to himself “and who the hell is Maribel?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this Maribel isn't the Maribel from 12x10, but I did think of her when writing about this OC


	7. Seven

They find that Castiel prefers Mary above all.

He hates Dean the most, or whoever he thinks Dean is. Every sentence starting with “you” is an arrow poised to fly from a taut bowstring, intended to prick, if not maim. Sam he tends to ignore, as if his presence is beneath recognizing. But Mary--Mary wins the only expression Castiel ever gives outside of resignation or disdain. He always greets her with a tremor of joy. It’s still hidden under layers of calculated indifference but the change is immediately noticeable.

The first time they openly discuss the disparity is when Mary mentions that they’re out of the tea tree oil cream they’ve been using for the scars around his neck. 

“Mom, I told you not to touch his neck. He’s, ah, sensitive about that.” Dean closes the large tome he’s been reading and takes the next volume Sam hands him.

It’s been five days since they’ve brought Castiel home; yesterday they found the third marking on his lower back and together the three circles form a pattern that they’ve been trying to decipher. Dean has been going through the inventory of dead languages to see if the pattern matches anything in another ancient language. If the circumstances were different Sam would have teased him about what it took to finally get him committed to hours of research; the only ribbing he chances now is complaining about how much worse the coffee tastes now that Dean’s refilling the pot.

“He was fine, actually, he even thanked me.” Mary starts pulling out a chair and then stops when she sees both her boys staring open-mouthed at her.

“When did this--how long have you two been hanging out?” Dean sputters. He sounds a little wounded and Sam understands. The last time Dean was in the room Castiel called him a “brood of vipers” which Sam assured him was a Biblical reference and not a commentary on his physical appearance.

It turns out that Mary has been frequenting Castiel’s room often, between her own bouts of insomnia and desperation to offer the angel some kind of small relief. “We talk,” she goes on. “Well, he talks. I’m afraid to say something wrong again.”

She gives them a litany of what’s been said, which is really a repetition of three things:

Castiel explains why he let Lucifer possess him.

Castiel swears he doesn’t know where Lucifer is.

Castiel asks her to tell “ _them_ ” that his word is true. He doesn’t know where Lucifer is.

“This is good,” Sam says in the same moment Dean sighs “what the hell?”

They look at each other and Dean shrugs unrepentantly. “What, it’s weird, Sam. Who does he think she is? Why is he talking to her and not us?”

Sam chews on the plastic end of the pen in his hand. “Someone who might still care about him. Even just a little. He’s appealing to some--some idea of mercy he thinks this person has. He never even tries that with you or me.”

“Yeah, which makes this even more suspicious. The last time he was having secret conversations with another angel it was Naomi, and look what she did to him.”

“I don’t think it’s like that this time.” Sam frowns, pointing to the paper in front of him. “I found something today. I’m not sure about it, but one of the lines in the first mark looks like an anagram of the Encohian word for the phrase ‘in the mind’ and here--” his fingers trace the outlineof the second mark “--are half the letters for the word ‘deceive.’ So the markings are interfering with his mind in some way. They’re making him see whoever the angels wanted him to see.”

“Zachariah,” Dean speaks up. “Remember he once used the memory of--” he glances over at Mary, who looks between the two of them with a furrowed brow and Sam shakes his head imperceptibly “--someone we knew. It’s one of the angels’ dirty little tactics. Cas, he calls me Dean but treats me like--he must think that I’m an illusion, being controlled by some other dick angel.”

“An angel looked like me to try and torture you?” Mary asks and Sam winces, chastising himself for letting him and his brother’s silent exchange linger for too long.

“We, ah, didn’t fall for it,” Dean lies weakly.

Mary closes her eyes. “That’s not the point. How could they do that? Angels of God tricking and manipulating people? Violating their minds?”

“That’s not even the worst they’ve done,” Dean grumbles, ignoring Sam’s hissed _“Dean, stop.”_ “This isn’t the first time they’ve tortured him, he’s always gotten-” he rubs two fingers against his forehead. “I guess it’s good that he talks to you, Mom. I’m sure it helps him in some way.”

“And it helps us to know exactly what they wanted from him,” Sam adds. “If he does tell you something we don’t already know make sure to fill us in.”

Mary bites her lip thoughtfully. “He doesn’t…well, one time he asked me something, it didn’t…I didn’t know what he meant, it didn’t make any sense to me.” She looks up at the boys’ tensed expressions and picks up the pace. “He said ‘haven’t I been punished enough, sister?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, I just--’

“Sick bastards, all of them,” Dean mutters, swiveling out of his chair and storming off towards the kitchen. “I’mma deep fry the whole lot.”

Mary still looks a little lost and Sam clears his throat. “They’re not just trying to use him to find Lucifer,” he explains, trying to suppress the quiver in his voice. “They’re punishing him for Lucifer.”

 _You choose this?_ Sam remembers asking, incredulous, when Castiel had knelt in front of him, gasping against the strain of the archangel inside him and muttering _I wanted to be of service to the fight._ “It’s my fault,” he says aloud. “We would have never been down in the Cage at all if I hadn’t been so desperate, so naive to believe that I was getting messages from God.”

“No, I should have told Cas that Rowena was just about to slam Lucifer’s ass back in.” Dean comes back into the room, flask clutched in hand. “I didn’t even say anything to him, I just went straight to you and I left him alone for Lucifer to--”

“Okay. Boys.” Mary raises her voice over their duet of guilt. “None of this is going to help us right now. We’re here for him _now_.”

In the end they decide that it’s best if Mary continues to visit with Castiel alone to allow him the comfort to confide in her. Still, the next time she goes into the room, and all those following, the boys always hover in the hallway, as if hoping to understand what he’s saying between the lines or pick up on some clue she’s missing. After all, they’ve known him for so much longer; they’re not envious, they tell themselves. They just wish that he would look at them with some shade of recognition, even if the color is false. That they can put a hand on him without it feeling like the burn of impending torment

Castiel lets Mary touch him without a single bitter remark. He calls her by name, _Mary_ , and it doesn't sound like a curse. She holds him in her arms and though he doesn’t reciprocate he doesn’t complain. Sometimes he even tilts into her embrace, body still stiff and arms rigid. His eyes wander more when she’s at his side. They aren’t fixed, bracing for impact the way he is whenever one of the brothers comes into the room.

In the past few days Sam has gone into the room to test a few theories about the marks. He applied a number of different treatments to the circles: holy water, an ointment made of sanctified sand and the bone marrow of a saint, and the heat of a blade burned in holy fire and then washed in holy water.

The last one elicited the furthest reaction to his presence has received so far from Castiel: he stared at him. For several unbroken seconds before returning his gaze to the wall.

Castiel never addresses Sam.

Sam knows he shouldn’t feel left out for not being on the receiving end of accusations, but he can’t help but wonder who it is the angel sees when he looks at him. Is it the torturer who could never be reasoned with, who forced Castiel to suffer silently? Or one of the henchmen too insignificant to even be known?

It nauseates Sam that the debate even rages in his mind and yet it does, because being considered evil is better than being nothing at all.

Somewhere in the back of his denial he thinks that maybe if Castiel acknowledged him he could utilize his imaginary identity to pull his friend back to reality. It’s arrogant to think he can achieve what both Dean and Mary have failed to do, but Sam allows the illusion to fester. Otherwise the knowledge that Castiel has endured all this in the name of protecting him will rot away at every waking thought. He has to believe that he can repay him somehow.

Of all people, he needs to be the one to save him.

Of course he ends up being the one to ruin him.

It isn’t supposed to go that way. It starts when Sam finds a spell--double checked with Rowena--that might be able to undo the markings. The spell requires physical contact with each of the markings so he explains the procedure to Dean and Mary, and all three of them walk into Castiel’s room.

The angel immediately straightens up. He’s been slumping down more and more these days, his rigidity failing to the evident exhaustion tearing him down. Sometimes Sam notices Castiel almost closing his eyes but then he flicks his eyelids open wide and pushes himself up against the headboard. No matter the condition of his grace its clear that it’s not enough to sustain his determined wakefulness, nor heal the blisters on his feet and wounds on his legs. They’re starting to scab over slowly, in increments of natural healing, but even that process is delayed by his weakened state.

Sam understands Castiel’s resistance to sleep; he would never choose to drift away and leave himself vulnerable in enemy hands either. But he also knows the deterioration that comes from prolonged fatigue and he’s desperate to find a way to undo the markings before their friend reaches that state of sleep deprivation. He leads the way into the room carry that banner of hope high but the minute Castiel sees them he jerks his shoulders back. The lumps under the blankets show the outline of his hands forming fists.

“No,” he breathes shakily, eyes widening slightly. 

Dean feels the bile rising in his stomach again. He can’t do this again. He can’t watch Castiel subject himself to what he believes is torture. But before he turns to leave he feels Sam grab at his elbow. Sam, who he expects to deliver some moralizing lecture about how they have to go through with this, is actually speechless. Dean pivots around and realizes who Castiel is staring down with a wounded glare of betrayal.

Not him. Not Sam. 

_Mary._

“You promised, sister,” he rasps. His voice is taunt, as if trying to stem the rising tremor. “You promised it wouldn’t happen again. You promised he would never…I haven’t resisted you. I give it to you every time you ask. You swore you wouldn’t do this.”

Mary steps forward, palms open and held up. “Castiel, listen, you don’t have to do anything. We just have to--”

Castiel slinks back quickly. “No. I’ll do it myself. I’ll do it.” The lines around his eyes tighten and he looks away. Dean has seen that look half a dozen times now. He’s seen it every time he tries to come close and Castiel bares his neck in expectation. It’s resignation that’s armoring his friend’s stony expression.

Dean feels a scream clawing through his chest.

“Let us help you,” Mary persists.

“I said I would do it,” Castiel hisses, forcing her to retreat. He peels off his coat and lays it to the side with reverence. Then pushes himself up a little, kneeling on the center of the bed with hands clenched around his knees.

Dean pitches his body forward and then freezes. He wants to stop whatever’s happening. He also doesn’t know what’s happening. "Cas, don't--"

“Cas, we’re not--” Sam starts to explain, but Castiel ignores both of them. His focus is centered on their mother. 

“Maribel,” he says quietly. “I will not forgive you for this.”

The angel sucks in a breath, and contorts his body forwards and backwards, writhing as a high-pitched whine streaks through their ears. The air becomes saturated with the tangled odors of bitter smoke and putrid blood. Dean reaches for Sam when suddenly his vision is full of black feathers.

Not shadows, not ashes. Solid, bristling barbs.

Castiel bows in the center of the bed, two giant crooked wings protruding from his back. His shirt hangs off his shoulders in torn strips. From where he’s standing, Dean can see rivulets of blood snaking down his spine. The wings are bowed, bent over in arches but even then the top of the wings scrape against the ceiling and the ends are dragging along the ground, swaying in an invisible breeze.

Sam staggers back up against the wall, eyes flitting back and forth endlessly to take in the wingspan in front of him.

Dean takes his own step back, trying to adjust his eyes to the sight before him. There are feathers, of course, shimmering black barbs, but they are few and far between. They hang down loosely, thin and bedraggled. Gaping hollows perforate the upper and lower folds of both wings. The bones are splintered and discolored in places, as if the feathers were torn from the roots.

“Take them,” Castiel whispers, keeping his head down until his forehead is almost touching the blankets. His shoulders rise and fall with the trembling heave of his chest. “Just take them.”

Sam feels every muscle in his body go slack and he digs his heels against the floor to keep himself from collapsing. _Cas_. His lips numb with the name but he never hears the syllable escape.

Mary covers her mouth to keep in a sob, but the tears stream down anyways between her clasped fingers.

Something cracks in Dean and he finds himself latching onto a lifeline he can’t see the end of. He knows what kind of enemy Castiel thinks he is; he doesn’t have a name but he knows the effect of his presence on the angel, the submission he always defers to him. Straightening up he fills his chest with air, enough to convince himself of this persona as he barks, “Put them back. _Now_ , Castiel.”

The air seems to wince, and then exhale as the wings flicker and then disappear. The strips of fabric hanging off his shoulders knit back into a unspoiled white shirt. Castiel remains in position on the bed, even as his arms wobble unsteadily. Dean knows his body must be instinctively reaching to curl in on itself protectively, but he's straining his muscles and keeping his stance as if insisting on some small resistance.

“Lie down.” The order comes out of Dean’s mouth, he’s sure, because no one else is talking, but he doesn’t recognize the harshness in his own voice. Castiel complies, folding himself meekly under the covers, eyes wide with fear.

He’s afraid of him. 

Dean thinks of the blood on Castiel’s back and how the skin must be blisteringly raw and torn there. He looks at the cowering angel and all he can see is Castiel on his back, broken from the bruise of his fists and with blood spurting from his lips as he faintly begged, _“No, Dean. Please.”_

He turns around and runs.

He doesn’t remember when he stops running, but he knows his hands touch the cold rim of the toilet bowl and his tongue tastes bitter acid pouring off it.

A hand presses on his shoulder and he hears Sam saying “it’s my fault, I didn’t know, I didn’t know” and “you did what you had to, you did what you had to.” He wishes he could tell his brother that with all the years of blood and death on his hands he’s never felt more like a monster than he does right now.


	8. Eight

They find a recipe for an angel sedative.

After the incident with the wings Castiel grows even more wary of them. He refuses to let Sam or Dean touch the festering wounds ion his back. He remains sitting upright, pressed against the headboard, eyes bloodshot and swollen from lack of sleep and what Sam thinks might be an infection from the wounds. Every time any of them approach him they receive a scathing glower of vitriol.

“We need to find a way to put him under, Sam. Just long enough for us to stitch and bandage his back,” Dean says one morning at breakfast. He stabs the butter knife at the cold piece of toast on his plate. “Unless you want to wrestle with him.”

Mary doesn’t say anything, but she looks up at Sam from the bowl of cereal she’s been stirring listlessly for the last few minutes. Her eyes are still swollen and bloodshot. She’s barely said a word in the past two days since Castiel revealed his wings. She hasn’t even gone near his room. 

Sam fidgets with the fork in his hand. He’s not hungry; he hasn’t been hungry for days but he makes himself load up the fork with scrambled eggs and push it into is mouth. “Let’s try a regular sedative first,” he concedes after he finishes the last bite. “With his grace the way it is it might work.”

“I’ll help clean him up once he’s out,” Dean mumbles, standing up and clearing their plates. 

The unpsoken decision is clear, leaving Sam to be the one to cross the dreaded threshold of that room and approach the angel. Castiel eyes him warily as he fills the syringe and then the moment Sam steps forward Castiel immediately moves to lay down, stretching out of his legs on the bed. and suddenly moves to lay down, folding out his legs on the bed.

But he’s not looking at Sam. He’s lasering those crystal eyes at the needle.

Castiel rolls up his right sleeve, layer by layer with definite routine. He holds out his arm and forms his hand into a fist, allowing the veins to rise clearer. Then he turns his head in the other direction, the way a child might look away when having a blood test.

Sam can see from the set of his jaw that he’s clamped his teeth together in a grinding lock. He wonders what his captors might have injected him with to make a celestial warrior thousands of years old afraid of needles. 

The sedative doesn’t work. Sam tries again with a double dose and there’s still no effect. Castiel remains as awake as ever, if slightly less lucid which adds a new dimension of paranoia to his demeanor. He doesn’t stare at the wall anymore; he constantly shifts his gaze back and forth, tracking every shaft of light and passing shadow, narrowing his eyelids into a squint at every person who comes into the room.

“It must be his grace.” Sam stands outside the room, leaning up against the door frame with hands in his pocket.

“If his grace is still there, then why isn’t he healing himself?” Dean sighs, throwing up his hands in exasperation. 

“You ordered me not to,” they hear from behind them.

Sam hates this. He hates how every nerve in his body freezes whenever they hear his voice. He hates the guilt that instantly warps Dean’s expression. It’s a guilt that doesn’t belong; it’s not the familiar tapestry of self-loathing that Dean has always wrapped himself in. It’s something strange and shapeless and Dean is forever wrestling with the knots of it.

Castiel is unperturbed as usual by their reaction. He angles his head slightly and frowns. “Where’s Maribel? She’s supposed to heal me.”

The boys look at each other, eyebrows raised slightly.

It’s a wordless decision when they both decide to go and talk to their mother. They find her in the kitchen, cleaning the pots from that night’s dinner of heated up tomato soup and crackers.

“He asked for you, Mom. he’s never asked for anything,” is Dean’s leading argument when Mary shakes her head vehemently.

“He asked for who he thinks you are,” Sam corrects. “And it was probably the sedative making him more anxious.”

“Sam, you’re here to back me up, aren’t you?” Dean glances over his shoulder with a scowl, to which Sam rolls his eyes at as soon as he turns back around.

“He hates me.” Mary puts down the pot she’s been scrubbing fiercely even though it’s already clean. “You saw how he looked at me that day, he thought I betrayed him.”

“ _Her_. Not you. Maribel.” If Sam doesn’t have an imaginary evil identity assigned to him yet the least he can do is remind his mom and brother that they aren’t actually who Castiel thinks they are. They’re simply phantoms in the way of the true target where the accusations are meant to land.

“Maribel must have been kind to him at some point,” Sam goes on, “or he wouldn’t have been so upset by what he thought she did. Maybe if we know more about her and who she really is we can summon her.” He holds up a hand to belay the protest already forming on Dean’s lips. “Summon her and question her, of course. We’ve got holy fire, we won’t let her go until we have the answers.”

“And then we can stab her. Good plan.” Dean claps his brother on the back and then puts a hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Mom, please, just try.”

Mary turns the pot over in the dish rack and dries her hands on the hem of the towel hanging off the side. “Okay,” she says slowly. “Okay.”

The boys trail after her as she makes her way down the hall and then feign dispersing their paths when Mary looks back at them over her shoulder. 

“You came,” Castiel remarks bitterly as soon as Mary walks into the room.

Dean and Sam steal closer, backs pressed to the hallway wall and straining to hear the muffled words from the room.

Mary hovers in front of the bed where the angel is sitting. Her arms dangle at her side and she nibbles on her lower lip, trying to decide if it would feel more insulting for a traitor to look at their victim or avoid their gaze.

 _She’s not a traitor,_ she tries to remember. _Maribel is._

But to Castiel she is Maribel. So she _is_ a traitor.

The vortex spins faster in her head and she sways a little, fingernails scraping against each other. Her knees feel like they’re pooling at her feet and every step feels like she’s walking up a river as she moves to the other side of the room and gets some ointment and gauze from the cupboard.

Healing. Maribel heals him. Maybe it’s the one action she can still do that won’t be misinterpreted. She ignores the nagging voice that reminds her that Maribel probably only healed him after he was been tortured.

The buttons to his shirt slip as her fingers shake when she tries to undo them. He doesn’t budge, doesn’t even lower his gaze to her. He pushes back a little as she nudges him to turn around but he can barely form a grip with his fingers before they slacken feebly and slip back down. When he finally turns his back to her she peels off the shirt and sees the jagged lines of dried blood and puss caked around his shoulder blades. She starts to wipe at it as gently as she can. His muscles instantly lock in tension under her touch but he doesn’t move away. 

“Do you remember the first time we fought together?” Castiel isn’t whispering, but he’s speaking so softly Mary almost holds her breath to hear him. “It was our first mission as a garrison. We were part of the defensive for an onslaught of demon hordes. Ishim was there, too. He kept dropping his blade down as if ready for attack. You told him the enemy would never break through to reach us, but then they did.”

Mary tries to steady her hand as she reaches for another piece of gauze. It seems wrong to be here. This isn’t her memory; this is his and hers. She’s just an intruding stranger dressed in the wrong skin.

“We took down hundreds that day. The stench of demon blood was everywhere and you nearly lost a wing, but you never relented. The Rit Zein had to drag you away for healing or you would have continued to fight as you bled out. You told them to give me your blade so you could still protect me even when you couldn’t be at my side.”

He stops. 

His jaw twitches before he starts again. “You were unafraid. All the hundreds of years we served together I have never seen you show cowardice. Your intentions have always been to defend and protect our kin, even in your alliance with _them._ ” The last word is spoken with dripping contempt.

Mary thinks he’s going to turn and face her now. Instead he closes his eyes and tilts his head upwards. “But I don’t know you now, Maribel. I don’t know the coward you’ve become. You who once shielded me with your life would now let them defile me before your very eyes.”

He opens his eyes and needles a glance over his shoulder. “You disgust me.” 

When Mary comes out of the room a few minutes later she is strangely composed.

Dean pushes away from the wall, asking “what did he say?” over Sam’s questions if she’s alright.

“He let me bandage the wounds,” is all she gives them at first.

Dean holds out a hand to stop her. “Mom. What did he say?”

She keeps her eyes on the stretch of hall beneath her feet, the black tiles surrounding her on either sides and the white squares leading endlessly forwards. “Maribel is an angel who served with Castiel. He trusted her. He trusted her with his life.” She walks away before she can hear their muffled reactions of surprise.

Sam feels his stomach sink through the floor. He can’t move beyond this place where hope dies. Dean starts to leave but then the echo of a light _thunk_ from inside the room sends them both rushing in to see Castiel’s forehead pressed against the bedpost, eyes drooped shut. He must have fallen asleep, and Sam winces to think of the bruise that will rise from the wooden knob digging into his skin.

But at the sound of their footsteps Castiel snaps his head up, smacking the back of his head hard against the wall. He flattens his shoulders back and steels his fists into the mattress, those bleary blue eyes struggling to hide the trepidation as he readies himself for what he expects to come next.

Dean tugs Sam out of the room and down the hall, as if he needs to be out of the angel’s earshot to say this. “Do you think they put him to sleep,” he begins tentatively, “in between…”

 _Torture sessions,_ Sam’s mind supplies. “Maybe. I mean he didn’t look like this when we first found him, he looked…” the word dares to cross his lips. “Better.”

“Sam.” He sounds so close to begging. “We need to find something that works to put him under, maybe something in those Enochian books that's especially for angels. He’s barely healing, he’s not sleeping, he needs-”

“You want me to use a spell to put him under? When he’s already suffering from whatever those markings are?”

Dean blinks, his reddened eyes glistening. “Sammy, he’s at home with us. He's finally at home and--and he’s getting worse. He’s getting worse.”

Sam struggles to find something to reply with, some flawless reasoning to stall them from having to resort to this, but all that comes out is “I know, Dean. I know.”

That night Sam pulls out all four volumes of the Enochian dictionaries, but not to work on translating the markings. He searches until he finally finds a recipe and then goes and collects the ingredients from the storage room. It’s a rare streak of luck that he doesn’t have to make Dean go out for a supply run.

In the morning when Dean stops by Castiel’s room and sees him lying there with eyes shut he asks Sam what happened.

“I found a recipe that works,” Sam says. “It’s actually called something like a ‘restorative sleep.’ They used it in emergencies during battle, the book said, drawing on the angel’s grace to stabilize both the angel and their vessel. Maybe it can help heal him a little, too. It’s supposed to be effective for up to twelve hours.”

A relieved smile drifts over Dean’s face. “Good work, Sammy. Now go shower and get some sleep. I’ll check on Mom.”

The warm water trickles through the curtains of Sam’s hair, the exhaustion of the last twenty-hours rippling through his body. As the walls of the shower stall disappears to the rising steam he tries not to think about what he didn’t tell Dean. How right before Castiel had peeled back his sleeve and held out his arm for the sedative he had stared at Sam and uttered a single seething reproach: “Filth.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we're getting to Sam's fake evil identity soon


	9. Nine

They find out that Lucifer escaped the bottom of the ocean.

Earlier that day Dean and Sam tried to summon Maribel to no response. Repeatedly. Sam suggested calling Crowley and asking him how it feels when he’s summoned and if he can refuse to answer the call.

“I don’t know how bloody angels work,” Crowley groans. “When you flannel-wearing morons try and summon me it feels like a disruption, but it’s not a pull. I can always choose to ignore you ungrateful lot.”

“Great, Crowley, that’s very helpful,” Dean snaps and is about to hang up when Crowley says the magic word.

“Lucifer.”

“What about him?”

“He’s free.”

Dean doesn’t miss the way Sam’s jaw clenches and he half wishes he didn’t have the phone on speaker right now.

“Where?” they ask at the same time.

“I’d tell you if I knew, wouldn’t I? Mother located a couple of burned out vessels in Maryland and Ohio but they’re all several months old. The ol’ boy must be in hiding now, with the angels on his back. Just thought you’d like to know, not like I expect a thank you.”

The dial tone sounds before they can ask anything else.

Sam retreats to the castle of his books and Enochian decoding while Dean fluctuates between helping him and resuming the search for Maribel and the other unnamed culprits. Mary joins Sam in keeping herself barricaded behind the wall of books.

With his brother and mother sufficiently occupied Dean decides to take the opportunity to test a theory that’s been growing in his mind. It’s not one either of his family members would approve of but he needs to know.

He needs to know why Castiel hasn’t even tried to leave.

If Dean was being held captive--w _hen_ he was held captive before he always made it a priority, every time he was roused from being knocked out or passing out from the pain, to test his binds. Rattle the chains, hurl himself at the locked door, holler for help. It didn’t matter if he was in a clearly abandoned warehouse, or that the iron links of the chain were thicker than his fingers, or that he couldn’t even feel his legs much less attempt a run. The trying was the reclaiming of himself, a promise to the belief inside even if the embers were already smoking ashes.

He tells himself now that he’s doing this for his friend. Right now Castiel sees Dean as his torturer no matter where he is, whether it’s the motel bathroom or the Bunker’s infirmary. If Dean can convince him to leave the room by his own volition, he might finally realize he’s not in captivity anymore.

But to give Castiel freedom he has to first assume the role of his jailer.

Dean feels a swarm of revulsion crawling under his skin, but he walks into the room and stands there at the foot of the bed. Arms crossed, shoulders back. The posture isn’t necessary; Castiel already sees him as the evil persona he’s adopting, but to Dean it makes all the difference. He needs to put some distance between himself and the character he’s about to play.

The angel sedative has worn off by now and Castiel looks just a little less pale. There’s still swelling around his eyes and when Mary changed the bandages on his back earlier that morning she said that they still weren’t healed but that there was less puss. The induced sleep seems to be healing him in small increments, but in between doses Castiel is more irate than ever. Dean doesn’t blame him; waking up in a villain’s lair is it’s own brand of torment, knowing you were exposed and vulnerable in the hands of the hostile. 

Castiel not only doesn’t look at him but deliberately angles his body towards the familiar wall that his eyes have seemingly befriended in this past week.

“Do you know what you’re here for?” It comes out louder than Dean expected. He cringes inwardly at the forced volume.

Castiel responds by scraping his finger along the metal bed post. It’s a jagged squeaking sound that almost makes Dean laugh because it’s such a childish sort of sullen sulking.

Still he tries again. “Castiel. Answer me.”

The fingernail slides down the metal bar in the other direction.

Dean tries to figure out what to say next and instead he hears Alastair whisper _you can do better than that, boy_.

He leaves without another word, bile burning the sides of his mouth.

It takes until after lunch for him to gather the nerve to try again. He takes one of the Enochian dictionaries to his room and tells Sam that he’s going to study there when his brother asks him what he’s doing.

Once Sam is sufficiently re-buried in the library Dean goes back into Castiel’s room with a new strategy in mind. If he can't convince him to leave he can at least utilize this identify to figure out useful information.

This time Castiel has his knees drawn up to his chest and arms loosely gripped around his knees. It reminds Dean of how he was when they first found him ten days ago, and how they truly thought the nightmare was over. It’s almost enough to make him break character.

Character. That’s what he is.

“Tell me what you know of our pact with the demons and I’ll release you.” When his words still provoke no reaction, Dean thinks maybe he overreached with that last promise. He needs to relate it to something more immediate. “Answer me and I won’t take any grace today.”

Just letting the words cross his tongue tastes like ingesting poison.

Castiel flicks half a look at him before resuming his silent conversation with the wall. For a minute Dean thinks he’s failed again but then that hollow voice resounds out:

“You are truly a coward. You hide behind the face of the dead and tell the same lies again and again. As if I don't know who you truly are.”

 _I was dead_ , Dean reminds himself. It’s so easy to forget, considering everything that happened afterwards. He needs to keep in mind how Castiel still thinks Dean died in that final fight with the Darkness over six months ago. 

“It-It’s no lie,” Dean recovers quickly. “I promise.”

“Wearing his skin doesn’t make him alive,” Castiel sighs, sounding almost bored. “Surely even you must tire of this charade.”

The angels who kept Castiel captive must have known that he was alive, Dean realizes. Maybe they tried to force Castiel to give up information on him too, but when they figured out he didn’t know of Dean’ survival they decided to use Castiel’s grief as another weapon in their arsenal. They wanted to deform and corrupt Castiel’s memory of Dean, to make his hands the ones dripping with blood and digging through his screams.

They wanted Castiel to remember Dean as his torturer.

Dean clenches his jaw and closes his hand in a fist. His shoes scrape against the tiled floor and he barely restrains himself from breaking his knuckles against the concrete cheek of the wall.

Shifting his weight from one foot to the other he decides to try a different tactic. He stalks over to the angel’s side, footsteps slow and heavy, and towers over him. “If I’m a coward, then what does that make you?”

“I’m nothing,” Castiel states, toneless, eyes vacant. “You think that I’m a traitor to Heaven and all of the angels. You think I deserve to suffer for allowing Lucifer to possess me and be released into the world. Perhaps you’re right. But you don’t actually want _me_ , you want who you think I will lead you to. And I never will.” He props his chin up between his knees and shrugs nonchalantly. “If you weren’t such a coward you would have killed me long ago.” 

It takes another day for Dean to be able to bring himself to try a third time. Sam’s planning to give Castiel another dose of angel sedative that night but Dean tells him to wait, saying “I’ve almost got through to Cas.”

His brother doesn’t question the gross overestimation; he understands the need for blind faith to sustain them from completely falling apart.

This time Dean storms into the room affecting the most wintry air of bluster he can manage and announces “You called me a coward, but I’m not. I had a plan, but this isn’t working. I’ve reached my limit with you. You can go. We can’t get anything more out of you.” He licks his lips and pushes himself to say the last part of his prepared speech. “You’re useless. Get out.”

Castiel raises an eyebrow.

Slowly a wide smile crosses his face.

For half a second Dean lets himself believe that he succeeded. Then the low cackle of laughter coming from the angel banishes the thought.

“You haven’t tried this one in so long.” Castiel shakes his head, still grinning in amusement. “You must be truly desperate or utterly bored.” He flops his legs over the side of the bed and strolls over to where Dean is standing.

Dean holds his breath. Castiel hasn’t voluntarily approached any of them since they found him. In fact he hasn’t even left the bed.

He comes closer until he’s a few inches away from Dean’s paling face. “Is this your new tactic, because I won’t try and escape on my own anymore?”

Dean’s mouth makes a stammering sound that the angel ignores.

“Don’t think that I’ve forgotten how you used to let me leave,” Castiel continues bitterly. “A broken sigil here, a careless guard there. I always suspected you were watching me. I still remember the last time, when you dragged back by the ends of my hair. You--” his face suddenly crumbles and he wheels away, back towards the bed. “You tried to cut off my wings,” he says to the wall.

Tears fill Dean’s eyes and he looks away even though there’s nothing to see. There’s just his best friend calmly sitting there explaining how he was put through an unimaginable violation. Every muscle in Dean is itching to rush forward and save him and yet there’s nothing to fight except a blistering memory.

“You let _them_ watch,” Castiel goes on. “All of them. Maribel stopped you then.” He jerks his head back with a horrible sneer. “Forgive me if I don’t fall for it again. I don’t think Maribel would stop you this time.”

Dean somehow has the audacity to rasp out, “Why?” He doesn’t even know which of the dozen questions in his head he’s asking about.

“It doesn’t matter where I go, you’ll always find me. And then find Sam.” His shoulder droops a little and he sits back down on the bed, still facing away from Dean. “You can do whatever you want to me. But you will _never_ make me lead you to him.”

A pause ricochets through the air.

Dean doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath.

“He’s not coming for me. No one is. You’ve lost already and yet you cannot even see it.” Castiel slides back into his position and draws his knees up again. His face muscles smooth back to their glacial expression, the impervious film sliding back over his eyes. “Your choice of words today were interesting. The real Dean once said something similar to me. It meant something else when he said it, though.”

Dean shuts out the echo of his own voice telling a crestfallen Castiel _you can’t stay._

“I think he wanted me to stay,” the same angel says aloud from across the room. Then the venom surges up his voice. “You’re nothing like him. You’re the kind of monster he would cut the head off of.”

When Dean storms out of the room he almost crashes into Sam who is standing right outside the door, horror stamped across his face.


	10. Ten

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's reading and joining me on this long, painful journey <3

They find that they’ve run out of the good whiskey.

Dean makes the announcement sandwiched between three and a half swear words and the percussion of opening and slamming cupboard doors.

Sam grabs him by the arm, hard enough to spin him around. “I heard you,” he says, eyes still blown open wide. “Dean what were you thinking? How could you say that-- _all of that_ \-- to him?”

“I was trying to help!” With a shove Dean throws his brother’s hand off and marches down towards the basement where he’s stashed his own secret emergency supply of liquor.

It turns out that supply is depleted, too.

And Sam is still traipsing behind him, prattling on angrily. “Help him? By pretending to be his torturer? If--when he gets out of this--what if he’s still going to think of you as that person because you--”

“Sammy, I don’t know I don’t know!” Dean runs his hands through his hair, digging his fingers hard into his scalp. “He thinks I am anyways, look at what we did to him.”

His brother stares at him. “Not we, Dean-- _them_.”

“Oh, sure, it’s alright for you to see the difference so clearly. He’s never looked at you like you’re the face of all evil.”

“That’s not true--” Sam thinks of the title of _“filth”_ that he was branded with two days ago. “That’s not the point. You can’t let it get it in your head like this, Dean, or we’re going to lose ourselves.”

“I’m already losing it, Sam. Every time I--” Dean slumps down to sit on the ground. He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. He can never block out the sound of Castiel’s words, not directed at him and yet especially for him all at once. He can never unsee the ruin that he--this person--has done to the angel. Sam’s wrong. This _is_ on them, on Dean, for making Castiel think that there’s no hope of rescue. That his one survival strategy left is surrender.

“What you said before, about why Cas doesn’t fight back.” Sam’s sweater sleeve brushes up against Dean’s shoulder as he slides down to sit beside him. “I think I know why.”

“Yeah, ‘cause he’s given up.” Dean thinks of the smell of Hell and how it permeated every sizzle and scorch of his skin on the rack until he finally pressed the burning brand into someone else’s flesh. “They broke him.”

“Not really,” Sam insists and Dean loves how doggedly his brother clings to lifelines that aren’t there and sees lighthouses from the bottom of the sea.

“It’s a coping mechanism,” his brother goes on. “You bargain with yourself that if it’s going to happen, you might as well choose to let it happen. Because then it becomes your decision, not theirs, and that gives you a tiny half-inch of independence.” He looks at the tiled floor beneath his loafers, the unflinching pattern of turquoise lines with white. “Sometimes that’s all you need to keep sane, just putting your own neck to the blade because if you resist and it happens anyways that feels too close to defeat. And enough of that will kill you faster than any torture.”

Dean thinks of Lucifer, out there in the world somewhere, and how the knowledge of that must be drowning his little brother. There are too many oceans converging now and not enough lifeboats to pluck them all from the rising tides.

“He thinks he’s protecting you,” Dean whispers.

“I heard.”

“He thinks we’ll never come for him.”

“Dean--”

“I tried to cut off his wings.”

Sam’s fingers dig back into his arm. “Not. You. _Him._ You’re not him.”

“What if I am, Sam?” His skin is itching, the way it used to when he was branded with the Mark of Cain. But this time there’s no ancient curse charring his flesh, no otherworldly menace to excuse the throbbing discomfort. It’s just reality, scratching against his very being like sandpaper on a wound and he can’t use any magic spell to erase this. “I’ve thrown him out, I’ve left him stranded, I almost killed him when I had the Mark. What if he sees me as this person because I am the closest to that, to _that--_ ”

“You didn’t hear what he said? He said you’re nothing like the real Dean. He knows who you really are.”

Dean stands up, putting some distance between himself and his brother. “Does he? Do you? Does Mom? She doesn’t even know half of what I’ve done.”

Sam sputters through some generic words of consolation and Dean doesn’t hear a word. His brother has always looked blindly at him, deluded by love and loyalty. But Dean knows exactly who he is; he’s a weapon. That's is how he was raised, that's the trajectory he’s been set on, that's the through-line of his life. Everyone else around him is the damage that sticks around like shards of shrapnel he can’t remove.

Sam stops talking when Dean starts pacing up and down the room. He stays seated on the floor, watching his brother for a moment before he speaks again.

“You’re angry at the wrong person, Dean. And that’s going to keep you from finding the right person.”

Dean taps the toe of his shoe on the tile crack beneath him. He could go for a supply run, get drunk in his room, pass out, and then sober up enough to repeat the process a few times. That might mute the urge to rip himself out of his own body. For a while.

Instead he goes back and holds out a hand to pull Sam up. “Show me what you’ve translated so far.”


	11. Eleven

They find out that the markings aren’t sigils.

It’s a spell.

Mary uncovers the first part of in the afternoon of the tenth day. Sam comes back to the library after checking on Castiel to see Dean marching up and down between the shelves in the library.

“It’s a spell,” he proclaims as soon as he sees Sam. His eyes are alight and he’s flailing the paper in his hand like a parade flag.

Sam ducks out of the way so it doesn’t hit him in the face. “What is?”

“Mom figured out that the squiggle where the lines meet is actually an alphabet. It’s a mix of two Enochian words for the phrase ‘whoever is under this spell’.”

“ _‘_ He who is bound beneath this curse,’ ” Mary corrects him, looking up from the scroll she’s hunched over. She smiles lightly at Sam and motions to the kitchen. “There’s a fresh pot of coffee on the counter. How is he?”

“He’s asleep,” Sam summarizes. “I had to use the angel sedative again but the infection is almost gone and the wounds are looking better too.” He doesn’t bring up how Castiel had frowned at him again before holding out his arm to be injected; he still has no idea what the angel is seeing when he sets his eyes on him. “But Rowena said she didn’t recognize the markings. It must be a spell specifically for angels.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Dean is almost glowing in exuberance. “There’s a counterspell for every spell. That means not only is there a way to break it, but that we can find it here.” He raps his knuckles on the small tower of books beside him, looking unduly pleased and Sam can’t help but crack a faint smile.

The first counterspell they try leaves Castiel thrashing in convulsions, drool leaking from his mouth as his eyes roll back white. Sam manages to make it stop when he recites the spell backwards, leaving Castiel lying still and unconscious again.

It turns out they mistranslated the third letter of the second marking.

The second counterspell they use is just another variation of the sedative they’ve already been giving him. Except this one knocks Castiel out for a full twenty-four hours. Dean counts it as a win because that means he’ll be that much more healed and recovered. Sam’s too tired to argue with him and Mary’s already fallen asleep in her chair, forehead pressed to the cover of an Enochian dictionary.

The third counterspell lists an angel’s grace as one of the ingredients.

Dean phones Crowley and yells at him for being a king of Hell without even one captive angel in his arsenal.

“The only angel I ever went after was your tree topper,” Crowley remarks and Dean breaks the phone instead of hanging up.

Sam thinks they’ve translated the curse wrong. The spell. No, Mary was right. It does make a difference. 

It’s a curse. Whoever cast it never intended to lift it. It’s not going to have a over-the-counter spell to undo it.

“Can we use some of his own grace for the spell?” Dean dares to ask one night. “Not all of it,” he adds quickly in answer to Sam’s aghast expression. “Just…I don’t want to either, Sam. But if it works? If it finally ends this?”

“We’ll find another way,” Sam insists.

Of course they don’t.

Dean brings it up again a few days later. It’s been almost two weeks since they found Castiel and they’ve made absolutely no headway in releasing him from the grip of his illusions of torture. Dean knows the crime of what he’s asking, how if they take his grace they would committing the same atrocity as his captors. But he tells himself over and over that they would be taking it to save him, not hurt him. Intention is the only virtue he has left to claim to; he remembers Castiel telling him years ago _you were stupid for the right reasons_ and _sometimes that’s all that matters_ and he hopes his friend can forgive him if this actually works.

 _When_ it works. It’s going to work.

“Okay,” Sam gives in wearily. “I know we have what we need to take it.” He knows exactly which box in the Bunker has the grace extraction needle; he doesn’t tell Dean he knows this because it’s been used on him before. Instead he makes up a story about seeing it once while cataloguing items. Neither does he doesn’t tell him that he knows extraction is excruciating from experience; he uses the words “it must be” when he explains why they should sedate Castiel first.

When Sam comes into the room to administer the sedative he’s prepared for Castiel's sullen irritation. It hasn’t even been a day since the last dosage so he suspects to see the glower on the angel’s face. What he doesn’t expect the way Castiel pulls away so abruptly he hits his elbow against the headboard. “So soon?” the angel croaks, holding out his other arm obediently even as the rest of his body shrinks away. “You just gave me hellfire yesterday.”

Sam stumbles into the table, almost knocking the bottle of disinfectant over.

Hellfire. That’s what he thinks Sam’s been giving him. Why he steels himself and looks away from the needle.

“It’s not,” Sam blurts out. He doesn’t say _I know what hellfire feels like and this is far from that_. “It’s not,” he insists.

It’s the wrong thing to say. He should know better by now. These days everything is the wrong thing to say.

Castiel blinks, as if straining to hold back in the shudder coursing through him. His eyes shift away, searching for another point to rest on before settling for gazing at a point on the wall directly behind Sam’s ear. “You haven’t done demon blood in awhile,” he breathes. “I thought he wanted to keep me alive.”

Sam bites down so hard on the side of his cheek he tastes blood. He needs that flash of pain to keep his mind clear and hand steady as he searches for a vein in between the bruises on Castiel’s arm. A few more seconds and the angel will be unconscious again, free from the agony he believes himself to be experiencing. He tells himself this over and over, yelling at the top of his lungs in his head so that he almost doesn’t hear Castiel say, “I’ll scream this time if you want.”

It’s muttered under breath, like a shameful confession. Castiel’s eyes are still pinned desperately to the patch of wall behind him. “I know you wanted me to before,” he goes on, hushed and hoarse. “I know what your kind desires. I will do it--I will. You wanted to hear my true voice. I will, I will scream for you.”

His gaze suddenly shifts, falling right on Sam. “Just give me the hellfire. Not the blood.”

_I know what your kind--_

Castiel thinks Sam is a demon.

Filth.

A demon. A blackened, corrupted soul wearing a suit of human flesh and driving the lifeblood of a poisoned inferno into his veins.

“It’s okay.” Sam feels his mouth form the words. He can barely see through the mist gathering in his eyes but his hand moves anyways, pushing the needle in.

A second later he understands that all the angel heard was the word “okay” because Castiel drops his jaw and releases a bursting scream, sending a spray of light bulbs cascading down on him.

Sam drops to the floor, hands plastered over the tears running down his cheeks. He rocks back and forth, ignoring the glass slicing into his knees as the angel screams again and again because he thinks Sam finds pleasure in the raw agony of his cry. 

He doesn’t remember Dean come running in and dragging him out or taping gauze to the cuts

He remembers that he’s a demon that an angel begged for mercy from.

He remembers that four times now Castiel has held out his arm to be injected with hellfire and not made a single sound of protest.

He remembers that in the past six months the angel has refused to succumb to the demon’s demand to scream until now.

Until _him._

When the room around him finally comes into focus he realizes that he’s sitting on his own bed. Dean is there, a hand on his shoulder. He asks if they did the extraction and his brother just shakes his head.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” Dean says, voice thin and scratchy. As if he was the one screaming to please his tormentor.

Mary moves in closer and puts an arm around Sam. They’re surrounding him, the way you wrap something in bubble paper so that it doesn’t break when it gets thrown from truck to truck. They know something he doesn’t, and they’re preparing him for the toss through the air.

“What?” Sam asks.

“It can’t be his grace, it needs to be from another angel. We went over the translation again. There’s only one way to break the spell, and--” Dean puts a hand on his knee “--I think the spell was designed with Cas in mind. It’s--” he glances over at Mary.

“It’s made to never be broken. What it asks for is impossible.” Mary is trying so hard not to cry and that breaks Sam right down the middle.

He wants to tell them to stop talking. He wants to shake them and yell at them to talk faster. 

Dean leans back, face half cloaked in the shadows. “It asks for ‘the willing sacrifice of a life force from one of his own. Given by choice.’ ”

Given by-- _oh_. Sam feels himself sinking through the mattress threads. Of course. Whoever put the curse on Castiel knows that no angel would ever choose to give their grace to him. The markings are a deliberate, specifically calibrated punishment.

Suddenly it’s clear why whoever was holding him hasn’t come after Sam and Dean, or even tried to reclaim Castiel. Because they know he’s still trapped. They know exactly what condition he’s in right now and how they don’t have to put him in a sigiled circle in a warehouse to keep him from escaping. 

The curse is a life sentence.

Sam looks at the two people around him, his brother and his mother, and how Castiel will never see the three of them as anything other than a torturer, a traitor, and a terror.


	12. Twelve

They find a routine of heartache.

None of them want to go into his room; none of them want to leave him alone. They develop a system of taking turns. Dean has mornings, Mary has noon, and Sam does nights. They decide three times a day is enough checking on him that they’ll catch any new developments.

Every morning and night they draw the spell to summon Maribel again. They run out of ingredients after one week.

Dean starts praying to Maribel even though the idea repulses him. Castiel should be the only angel he prays to. But if there was ever a smidgen of mercy in her, maybe his prayers can reach it and bring her to them.

The sores on Castiel’s feet heal to smooth brown scabs, but he still never leaves the bed. Dean tries to coax him out once and Castiel's response is to spit in his face. It’s the first act of opposition Dean’s seen in him and he can’t explain to Sam why it’s making him grin like an idiot. He thinks now is the moment when Castiel starts resisting and that’s when they can feign defeat and offer him true victory.

But the next day when Dean tugs him towards the door he scrambles away, backing into the wall like it has arms to hold and save him. “It won’t do you any good,” he chants desperately even as he peels his coat off in preparation. “It won’t do you any good. Taking my wings won’t help you find Lucifer.”

Dean screams at him to stop before the wings are completely unfurled. Castiel refuses to let him touch his back to clean the blood plastered across his shoulder blades. Mary ends up wrapping the bandages around the split skin while Castiel calls her an unrepentant hypocrite.

Most days Sam brings an Enochian dictionary to bed to study until he falls asleep. He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be translating but he keeps memorizing the same words.

Jody and Donna come by and Mary flinches every time they call her Mary. They bring food and clear the library from the layers of books that cover it. They make the boys and their mother eat the first full homecooked meal in days. Jody mentions that Claire’s been praying to Castiel and Dean tells her to tell her to stop and pray to Maribel instead. He has no idea what the curse is making any prayers that Castiel receives sound like but he’s sure it's only another twisted form of torment.

Sam is cleaning out the infirmary one day and Castiel suddenly starts screaming. He can’t figure out why until he realizes that among the used gauze and bandages in his hand is also an old syringe. He buries the syringe into the bottom of the trash bag and then stays in the room until the angel finally stops. Somehow Sam doesn’t feel the stripe of blood leaking from his ears until he’s sitting down for dinner and Dean grabs a wet napkin and wipes it off.

They stop trying to hide when they’re falling apart.

Dean comes home from a supply run one day to find Mary in the kitchen, trying in vain to scrub clean the towel from the first day. The stain of feathers have been there ever since and none of them wanted to throw it away. Dean tugs at the towel repeatedly until his mother finally lets go and bows her head against his chest, soapy hands pressed to her mouth.

Mary stops by the garage one afternoon to see Dean hunched over the hood of the impala, a wretch clenched in his fists as his shoulders tremble. She gathers him into her arms as he holds on tight, grease smearing the back of her shirt.

It’s early morning when Sam breaks a cup and can’t bring himself to pick up the pieces. He sits on the floor beside the white fragments and Mary joins him until he pulls himself together enough to go get a broom. 

Sometimes Sam stands over Castiel’s bed while he’s sleeping under the sedative and imagines that he’s watching over him the way the angel used to guard them.

He thinks _I’ll keep you safe. No one will ever hurt you again._

And in those few minutes the angel looks peaceful enough for Sam to almost believe that it’s true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hang in there. tide's about to turn


	13. Thirteen

They find a willing sacrifice.

It’s been forty days since they found Castiel. 

They haven’t gone on a hunt in forty days.

They redirect all potential hunts to other hunters; they never stop checking the news for cases, but they can’t imagine going on one. It doesn't take three of them to watch one immobile angel, but it’s not just about Castiel; none of them want to be left in the bunker alone with him. Dean outright refuses when Sam suggests him and Mary follow up a lead on Lucifer, and Sam just shakes his head when Dean says he and Mary could go just as well.

Mary’s look silences the debate. Their mother carries herself differently now; wary of her own footsteps and conscious of the sound of her name. She’s never met an angel before and her introduction to them has come in the form of brutality and horror and brokenness. Her instinct to shelter him is overwhelming; it spills out to Castiel every moment she sees him and it's the rebuttal that scars most deeply.

But they all pull through the thorns in their chest and keep going into that room, every day.

Until the fortieth day.

Nothing drastic changes in the angel’s condition. All his injuries have fully recovered but he still sits on that sparse bed in the infirmary staring at a wall, the monotony only severed to deliver insults to them whenever they attempt any kind of interaction.

Dean comes out of the room after his scheduled shift to give him the sedative. Castiel, still abstaining from relying on his grace and refusing to eat or drink anything, quickly grows dehydrated and faint from sleep deprivation. They find they have to give him a dose every few days just to keep his physical health stable.

Dean makes his way over to the library where Sam’s seated at a table, fixated on reading some Enochian text on his computer screen. He pours himself a glass and sits down on the opposite chair, clearing his throat before speaking. “We need to find a way to make it stop.”

Sam doesn’t even look up. “We can’t.”

“We have to. It’s--it’s wrong for him to have to be like this, this isn’t the kind life he should be living.”

This time the lack of eye contact is deliberate. “That’s not an option.”

It is an option. Unspeakable, but still existent. It’s been floating inside all their heads ever since they realized the curse was unbreakable. That the remedy was deliberately impossible. None of them dare to say it, but their conversations all linger on the precipice of it. Their words walk around it like they’re guarding it from spilling out. They exchange looks that scream it but never break the static of the air.

Sometimes Sam will suggest finding a “consciousness suppressor spell” and Dean will rephrase that as “give him enough sedative to keep him out unti…” he never really finishes the sentence. It’s bad enough that he even verbalizes the start of it. Mary rejoins with the insistence that they need to find some way to “change the situation” and her train of thought always tapers off with “something, anything, just _anything_ …”

They’ve all had the same thought cross all their minds, that death would be the kindest mercy for Castiel. The repugnant shivers and self-flagellation that always follow the mental suggestion can’t diminish its existence. 

“This isn’t a solution, what we’re doing.” Dean goes on. “Maribel never answers so she’s either dead or a complete bastard. Crowley and Rowena have nothing, even the--” he scrunches up his nose in disdain “--frigging British Men of Letters, pompous ass know-it-alls, are totally useless.”

Sam stops typing.

“It’s been more than a month, Sammy.” Dean holds the whiskey glass in a death grip but doesn't raise it to his lips. “He’s in the same place as if we never found him at all.”

Jody calls before Sam swallow the truth of that bitter pill.

She calls every few days and comes by every week. Sometimes she comes with Donna, or Garth, or Eileen, and once even Alex showed up, but never Claire. They asked her not to tell Claire the details of what happened to Castiel. The girl might have a complicated relationship with the angel but at heart Claire is a fighter. There’s no telling what she would do if she knew the full extent of what had been done to him.

“Hey.” Just the sound of her voice on the phone makes them breathe a little easier. It’s something real, something warm and bright reaching into the valley their lives have become. “How’re you all holdin’ up?”

“Holding,” Dean replies. “Up is not really the direction, but we’re holding. How are the girls? Staying in school I hope.”

Jody hammers around for a few seconds before admitting that she’s let Claire go on a few hunts. Never alone of course, always with other hunters. She dodges their questions for a few more minutes before confessing further that Claire is looking for something to help Castiel.

She doesn’t say “looking for angels” because otherwise Dean would have a fit. He’s barely below shouting level right now.

“We’re worried about her safety,” Sam reiterates over Dean’s exasperated “what is that girl thinking?”

“She cares about him, alright?” Jody interrupts the duet of protest. “She told me, he’s not her dad, but he still needs--”

Sam sucks in a breath, face draining of color as he almost drops the phone from his hand. “Say that again.” he demands. Dean stares at him in a mixture of confusion and concern. “Say that again.”

“What,” comes the voice over the phone. “That Claire thinks Castiel deserves to be saved no matter--”

“No. He’s not her dad, that’s what you said. But he is, his vessel, his--” Sam grabs Dean, digging his nails into his shoulder so hard that his brother winces. “Dean, listen, ‘a sacrifice from one of his own’. Claire Novak.”

“What about her?” 

Jody catches on before Dean does. “You want to kill Claire to save him?”

Sam holds the phone closer as if it can offer her some reassurance. “No, no, I don’t think we’ll need to kill her.”

“You _think_?” she retorts.

“We’re coming over, Jody, we’ll explain everything then. Don’t tell Claire until we get there, okay?”

After Sam hangs up Dean looks on in wonder and repeats “You want to kill Claire?”

“I’ll explain it on the drive over there.” Sam is already moving around the table, collecting papers and translation sheets from between the piles of books and stuffing them into a folder. “We need to get to Sioux Falls like, yesterday.”

Dean catches the look in his brother’s eyes and nods without another question. Instead he goes to find Mary and tell her that she needs to stay with Castiel.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he says, trying to soften the edge of what he’s asking her. “I promise we’ll be back by tomorrow afternoon, okay?”

She nods, smiling bravely even as her eyes flicker nervously over towards the infirmary door. “It’s alright. You go and come back with a way to save him.” 

“Don’t talk to him, okay,” Dean warns her before they head out the door. “Just make sure he’s doing alright but don’t…don’t.”

She pats his arm gently. “I know. I’ll be fine.”

When they leave the sound of the door lock sliding into place echoes like the Bunker has become a stone prison cell. Mary paces softly through the winding halls, trying to mute the sound of her own footsteps and hoping that they don't sound like the approach of the enemy to Castiel. Eventually she goes and sits on the floor with her back to the closed door of the infirmary. She starts to softly sing “Hey Jude” because it’s harder to cry when your throat is full of song.


	14. Fourteen

They find that Claire is obsessed with baking.

There are three pies in the kitchen, two trays of cookies in the oven, and some sort of experimental muffin-shaped bread loaf on the table that Jody sliced into the “wrong shape, and too thick,” Claire complains even though she nibbles on a piece from the tray.

The ride to Sioux Falls had Sam and Dean discussing and re-discussing every nuance of the plan and how to explain it to Claire. But now, standing in front of the girl who’s looking up at them with bright green eyes and blonde hair parted into two braids, suddenly makes them feel like executioners. They’re doing everything they can to delay having to carry out the sentence. Dean turns his attention to the pies and offers to cut one up, then slides almost an entire half onto his plate. Sam unscrews the cap of the cookie jar on the counter and reaches in eagerly.

“I dint know yoush were into quoking,” Sam mumbles through a mouthful of warm vanilla drop cookies.

Claire shrugs, brushing the crumbs off her lap. “Hunting makes me crave sweets, I dunno why.”

“You're telling me. She’ll be in the kitchen with vampire blood still on the cuffs of her jeans and beating egg whites like it’s normal,” Jody chuckles, pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. “I had to convince her last time to change first because I was afraid we’d end up with ghoul gunk in the batter. I think it’s good, though. All that post-hunt adrenaline's gotta run off somewhere. Might as well be in something you can eat.”

“Also Alex hates carrots," Claire piped up, "so I like sneaking them into different desserts and seeing if she’ll notice."

Alex puts down the plate of pie she’s been devouring. “This is a banana cream pie, how the hell?”

Claire twirls her hand with a magician’s flourish and Alex throws a middle finger at her behind the back. Neither of the boys point out that Alex surreptitiously takes the plate with the remaining pie back to her room.

But the desserts only delay the inevitable.

Eventually Jody needles them with a mother’s persistent stare and Dean and Sam have to confess what they’re really there for. They move to the living room and sit on the sofa across from Jody and Claire as Sam explain the markings they found and the curse that Castiel is under. From his duffel bag Sam pulls out the folder of photos and charts and translations that he passes over to them. He knows that they don’t need evidence to be convinced but he brought it along anyways; maybe more to give himself proof that they truly have no other choice but to ask this of Claire.

Before Sam can start to explain the translation of the curse Claire flips to the back of the paper and squints. “What’s this?” 

Dean stands up to glance over and then sits back down, eyes widening in consternation at Sam.

Sam frowns for a second before he remembers. He used to scribbled down notes on the back of the translation paper, notes about their interactions with Castiel. It was from the first few weeks, when he had hoped to detect some pattern and then reverse it. One of the those pages must have made it into the stack. Without even looking he knows that there are details there about the torture Castiel thought he was being put through, details that would make anyone nauseated.

When he tries to grab the folder back Claire holds it out of his arm’s reach. “Let me see,” she snaps. “If you’re asking me to help, I need to know everything.

“Claire, you don’t want to see that. Cas wouldn’t want you to know--” Dean wets his lip. “It’s not going to help you.”

“I’m not a kid, Dean, you don’t have to--oh my god.” Her hand drops to her mouth as her eyes run down the page.

Jody leans over and then looks away, closing her eyes for a moment. They’d told her in general terms what effect the curse had on the angel but even she hasn’t known of it in such graphic highlights. 

“You guys--” Claire nibbles at her lip “--this has been going on all this time?”

Sam lowers his eyes and nods.

The folder drops to her lap and she sits, hunched over, head bowed before springing up and punching Dean across the jaw. “I told you to keep an eye out for him! I told you to take care of him!” Dean stumbles back as her fist clips his cheek again but keeps his hands at his side. “You promised, you told me you would. You were supposed to--” another hit, this time on the nose, and Jody rushing to pull her back, Sam rising to his feet- “you were supposed to, you told me you would--” she barrels her head into his chest, sobs pouring down the front of his shirt “--take care of him. Why didn’t you take care of him? Why?”

Dean lifts his hand slowly and rests it on the back of her head. He tries to say _“I’m sorry”_ and nothing comes out but the croak of a sound.

After a moment Jody gently pulls Claire off him. Dean can still feel the marks of her nails carved into his spine from how tightly she held on.

“Give us a minute,” Jody says over her shoulder as she guides Claire away.

Sam and Dean sit silently in the living room, picking at the slices of bread on the tray in the center of the coffee table. The homebaked treat suddenly tastes like ash in their mouths.

“I didn’t--” Sam attempts and Dean shakes his head.

“She would have found out anyways,” he mutters, eyes glued to the carpet threads below his shifting feet.

When Claire comes out her eyes are swollen but dry. She sits back down on the sofa, leaning slightly towards Jody who puts an arm around her.

Dean looks up cautiously, like he’s expecting another blow to the face. He would let her do it; he’d let them come, as many as she wanted. It’s much less than he deserves.

Claire looks at him with a twinge of almost apologetic guilt but says nothing.

Jody finally breaks the layered silence. “What do you need?”

Dean looks to Sam to answer.

“Your blood,” Sam says to Claire.

Claire knots her fingers together tightly. “How much?”

Sam faces Jody now. “A lot of it.”

Dean rubs a thumb across his bruised nose. “You don’t have to, Claire. We’ll find another way.”

“No you won’t. I’m all you’ve got.” She bites her lip again but the look in her bloodshot eyes is firm. “I’m all he’s got.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is my first time writing Claire but I love her so much and I hope you enjoy my version of her


	15. Fifteen

They find a way to keep from killing Claire.

Claire keeps up a running commentary all throughout the drive back to the bunker. If she has to sit and reflected on what’s going to happen once they arrive at the Bunker it’s going to make her want to scream. So she keeps talking, even over the sound of the songs playing on the radio. “So when you do guys kill me?” “Who gets to kill me?” “When am I scheduled for killing?” “Are you sure it's legal to kill me if I agree?”

When Sam suggests doing the blood withdrawal in stages she quips, “There’s gonna be chapters of you killing me, how novel.”

Sam laughs a little at that one and Dean elbows him to stop.

“We don’t even know if this will work,” Dean admits and Claire rolls her head back dramatically.

“You guys suck at killing,” she groans and this time Dean’s the one who laughs.

When they arrive back at the Bunker Mary greets them at the door with hugs. Sam can't help but notice how she holds on a little longer to him than usual.

“I’m sorry we took so long,” he says before asking “how is he?”

“Same.” She rubs her hands together before pushing them into her pockets.

“Mom,” Sam prompts. It’s always strange how easily he can read her. Since the Darkness brought her back more than seven months ago it’s been like building a relationship with a stranger and yet it immediately feels intimate. He knows and he doesn’t know her, but what he doesn’t know is always surrounded by what he does. “What happened?”

“Nothing really, he just started talking in Enochian. For awhile.” Her hands come out of her pocket and she presses a button on the phone screen. “I started translating it, but you can probably understand it better. It seems he’s answering questions of some kind.”

A low, raspy drone bleeds out of the phone speakers. “He’s saying ‘I am an angel of the Lord’, ‘I have no station’, ‘I do not follow Heaven’--is that…” There’s a cadence to the Enochian, one strangely familiar and Sam furrows his brow in concentration. “Is he singing Hey Jude?”

Mary blushes. “No, I was. I thought it might help.”

“I think he thought you were speaking Enochian,” Sam says with a small smile. “He’s answering questions like a catechism.”

“At first I thought he was just singing along,” Mary admits, “but then he started sounding more and more frantic.”

The phone speakers hiss and Castiel’s voice grates through, hitching on the edge of hysteria. “He’s saying _‘_ I will not give you Sam Winchester, I will not betray my charge’.” Sam moves a finger over the screen, cutting off the desperate sound. “The same line over and over-- ‘I will not betray my charge’-- his charge, that’s me.”

“Sam--”

He shakes his head, blinking hard. “All of this is because of me, Mom.”

Sam forgets how he started the conversation in the hopes of comforting her and lets her wrap him in her arms. Her head rests against his chest and her fingers kneed against his back, firm and steady. He doesn’t remember ever being held in her arms as a baby and now he’s too big to fit properly, but he still feels like he’s a child when she surrounds him. Like her voice is magic enough to hold the nightmare at bay even just for a moment.

When they return back to the main room Claire is fighting with Dean about whether or not she can have a beer.

“You’re going to kill me and I can’t have a last drink?” 

“We’re not going to kill you,” Dean sighs, still holding out the bottle of Cola with a blue straw sticking out from the top. “Not completely. Just something like it. Sammy’s figuring it out.”

“We’ll figure it out together,” Mary announces and that settles it. The presence of a parental figure also quiets Claire’s protests and she takes the Cola with a small grumble under her breath. Mary offers to take Claire to find a room to put her things, leaving Sam and Dean to find a way to make good on their word and devise a way to use Claire to break the curse and also deliver her back to Jody alive and well.

In the end they decide that they have to call in a favor from Rowena. Survival after losing more than forty percent of the body’s blood is unlikely; Sam figures that that amount is equal to the life force the undoing spell asks for. But a transfusion of that amount would bring Claire to the brink of brain damage from hemorrhagic shock. Dean makes calls to different doctors, asking for information under the guise of being a medical student researcher, while Sam tries to convince Rowena to help them.

When Rowena arrives later that afternoon she takes one look at the spell work and says they need to inject Claire’s blood directly into Castiel. An angel’s grace would flow directly into the core of his being; the spell, altered as it already is, has to be administered directly for maximum effectiveness.

Sam balks at the thought of subjecting the angel to regular injections. “You know what he thinks they are,” he tells his brother under his breath. “Do you really want to watch him begging us for-”

“Okay,” Dean says. “We’ll sedate him first. Then give him a small dose of the blood spell every hour. That way we can watch for changes and see if it’s working."

It’s too similar to the process of curing a demon. Sam doesn’t remind Dean of the consequence of that procedure. They just look at each other for a moment before Sam says “Rowena, are you sure you can keep Claire alive without any permanent damage to her whatsoever?”

“Do you boys think so little of magic?” the witch scoffs. “I’ve brought myself back to life, keeping a wee one like this will be easy. She’ll be perfectly fine.”

Dean hesitates. “Do you need to--for the spell to work do you need to...see him?”

Her dark eyes soften. “No. He wouldna want to see him like that. Just call for me when you start taking the blood. I must be by the child’s side before you finish.”

Claire, on the other hand, insists on seeing Castiel before she lets them take a single drop.

“I know,” she says in reply to each of their specific and detailed protests.

 _He won’t recognize you, he will say untruthful things to you, he will treat you like_ _some evil villain_ _, he might feel threatened by you, he isn’t who you remember him to be._

“I know,” she continues, saying those two words like it’s all the argument she needs.

When Mary and the boys finally stop talking she simply stands up. “I’m going to see him.”

They all follow her approach to the room. Dean rests a hand on Claire’s shoulder and holds the sedative syringe in his other hand. Sam stands at his side with an arm around Mary. The four of them hold their positions like soldiers approaching enemy lines as they open the door and walk into the room.

The last time Claire had seen Castiel was almost a year ago, before he had been possessed by Lucifer. During his days of recovery after Rowena’s spell Sam had taught him how to use Skype to make calls on his computer and the angel had called her to discuss the show he was watching about “how the color orange correlates to black in a way that’s new.” He had struggled to grasp the technique of video calls, often veering too close, his blue eyes filling the entire frame and Claire had spent most of the call trying to direct him to sit back through peals of laughter.

The last time she’d heard his voice was, she later found out, a few hours before he disappeared. He had phoned her after God and Amara had left and the sun had returned to its golden glow. “I’m so sorry, Claire,” were the first words he said when she realized it was truly him and not the archangel possessing him. Just hearing the thin fracture in his voice when he spoke her name almost made her start crying then and there if Alex and Jody hadn’t been at her side.

“What happened?” she had asked and it took a second for the angel to response, a second that was weighted in months of untold story.

“I’ll tell you more when we get back to the Bunker,” had been his answer. “It’s good to know that you are safe, Claire.”

That was over seven months ago. She stares at him now, cheeks gaunt and shoulders hunched even while pressed against the wall. It takes a few seconds for Castiel to shift his eyes towards them and when he finally sees Claire his face muscles contract. He works his jaw carefully, lips shut, but throat bobbing wildly.

“Cas?” she says, warnings be damned. “It’s me.”

“No,” he gasps, turning to level his gaze at Dean. “ _You_ _._ This is truly sickening. How could you let such evil defile a child?” He spares half a glance at Mary. “I shouldn’t be surprised that you allowed this, Maribel. This is who you are now.” He doesn’t bother to hide the hurt in his eyes. “You are no better than _them_.”

Claire grabs Sam’s wrist for support as Dean leaves her side to go inject the sedative. She’s leaning so hard on Sam that he’s sure if he steps away she would collapse. She wants to run to him and yet he looks stricken at the mere sight of her. Not in the way he looked when he first found her at the youth home over a year ago, not with eyes brimming with unconfessed guilt and sincerest intentions. The way he’s looking at her now is a whole different concoction of regret and desperation.

He doesn’t know her.

They’d predicted this already and she didn’t, _couldn’t_ accept it until now.

Mary comes around the other side, whispering under her breath about leaving, but Claire shakes her head mutely.

Castiel rolls up his sleeve and holds his arm out willingly, but he doesn’t look away this time. “She is a child,” he says to Dean firmly, as if summoning up the strength to command. “Release her. Purge the demon from her and leave her unharmed and I will give you anything.” He touches a shaking finger to his throat. “My grace. All of it. My wings. You can have them. Just let her go.”

Dean keeps his head down as he taps Castiel’s for a vein. He restrains himself from responding, for fear that a single word from him will sound like a command to the angel to rip out his grace or wings.

“He thinks I’m possessed.” It comes out much louder than Claire intends and Castiel immediately switches his gaze to her.

“Get out of her,” he thunders. “I will find you,” he goes on, dropping his voice to a thin razor blade’s edge. “And I will banish you to a place worse than Hell.”

Before Dean pushes the needle in his arm, Castiel tries to stop him. “Take me,” he begs, wrapping his fingers around Dean's wrist. “Let them take me to Hell. You spoke of it before--I will go, I will go willingly. But let the child go, Israfiel.”

 _Israfiel_. Dean finally has a name to who he is and it cuts through him like a beheading.

“Just take me,” the angel pleads, a tear slipping down his nose. “Let her go. Take me. Please.”

Claire feels the prickle behind her eyes and she whirls around, burying herself in Mary’s arms. She’s losing her father again. She’s not and she is. The cracks along the fault lines are breaking in the same place.

Dean manages a helpless glance over to Sam and his brother shakes his head. There’s nothing they can say that won’t be twisted into an even worse torment.

“Take me,” Castiel repeats as Dean pushes the needle in. The two words still cross his lips over and over until the drowsiness descends and the sedative pulls him from consciousness to black.

Once he’s asleep Claire disentangles herself from Mary and moves forward. Step by step she crosses the room and sits down on the bed, the mattress shifting under her weight. She suddenly feels so very tired, as if the string holding up the reality of what has been done and what must be done has been untied. Her body tips to the side and she lays down next to the angel, cheek resting on the crook of his shoulder.

She stays there, fingers tangled in his as Sam pushes the needle into her arm and the red begins to flow.


	16. Sixteen

They find out that the first change happens after twenty-four hours.

Castiel wakes up to see Claire sitting by his bedside and he asks “Who are you?”

She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Dean comes running into the room when he hears both.

Sam says “we can work with that” when he hears of the amnesia. He retracts that statement after he gets close to the angel with another syringe of the blood spell and Castiel stares at him with widening eyes of confusion.

“Why are you hurting me?” the angel yells. “Why?”

No one knows how to answer him.

“I don’t understand,” Castiel protests when Claire repeats her name in his ear. “I don’t know you. What am I doing here?”

The markings on his chin and between his toes are fading. That’s the only indicator that the spell is working. Before she left Rowena had divided the blood spell into nearly one hundred capsules of blood to be injected into him. “Blood and grace contain powers of a different kind,” she explained. “If you give it to him all at once it could be a shock to his system, one too great to recover from.”

So they keep administering the doses, by the hour, but the anemia doesn’t fade.

It’s somehow harder now to ignore what he says; at least when he thought they were torturers they knew the general outline of what he was seeing, they knew the shape of the fog clouding him. Now they have no idea what warped vision he’s witnessing. Whatever they tell him falls right past his ears, and yet in moments he’ll echo their words back to them, adding a question mark on the end.

“Claire? You know me? How?”

“Sam? I’m alright? Where am I?”

“Dean? Don’t do what? Why are you hurting me?”

“I’m safe? Mary? Did you bring me here?”

He wraps himself in layers of paranoia; his questions pour relentlessly, nosily, and always increasing in fervor. Every time they touch him he asks why.

He asks if it’s going to hurt.

The only theory Sam has is that in order to break the curse the spell is resetting his mind; he estimates that this might continue until all the markings have completely vanished. Until then they try to stabilize Castiel’s panic by talking to him and reminding him of where he is and who they are. But it soon becomes clear that whenever they’re with him his crisis is only exacerbated. He goes into overwhelming hysterics the more they try to reassure him. The more they stay at his side the more terrified he becomes.

“Why are you here? Why? Tell me,” Castiel almost screams at Sam, pushing him away with shaking hands.

Eventually they have to force themselves to leave him alone. They check on him every few hours but only hover by the doorway, slipping away when the frantic questions start up again. He usually falls silent soon after they’re out of sight; he even starts to fall asleep when they’re not in the room.

Sometimes Castiel wakes up in the middle of the night calling out for answers as to where he is and what happened. Claire lies awake listening to the rushing footsteps of Sam and Dean pouring down the hall, followed by the shrieking plea from the angel of “Don’t come any closer! Who are you? Are you going to hurt me?”

The walls of the Bunker echo with his cries, a lost child frantically searching for a parent's hand he never finds.

After a few days Mary gives Claire a pair of ear plugs. “You need to take care of yourself,” is all she says.

Claire gives them to Dean who gives them to Sam who throws them away.

The next day Dean fishes them out of the trash and pockets them.


	17. Seventeen

They finally see what happens when the last marking disappears.

It’s the answer to the one question they’ve all been asking. Dean asks it when he pulls the second to last needle from Castiel’s arm and pushes a swab of cotton on the tiny bleeding wound. The angel still won’t heal himself, and the bruises from the injections gather like tattoos.

Mary whispers it by Sam’s side as he empties the final syringe of the blood spell into the angel’s vein.

Claire mutters it groggily when she comes into the main room for breakfast the next day.

_What will happen?_

They find out what happens.

Nothing happens.

The last marking has faded completely, leaving the skin beneath his chin and between his toes and on his lower back smooth and spotless. And still Castiel wakes up gasping every _who, what, why_ and _where_ question, the same as before.

Sam walks out of the infirmary, ignoring his brother’s voice, and heads straight for the Bunker door, closing it with an deafening slam. Claire huddles close to Mary, mumbling something about needing to call Jody and tell her she’s not coming home yet. She has to stay, she promises herself. Just until Castiel looks at her and give her one of his doofy little smiles.

Dean keeps his hand away from the whiskey bottle long enough to try and text Sam.

 _“Don’t do anything stupid,”_ he writes after a string of unanswered texts for him to come back.

It’s late evening when Sam finally returns, trudging down the staircase looking like he’s just crawled out of a food processor. He ducks Dean and Mary’s persistent line of questioning and goes straight to the shower when he turns the water on full blast. It hurts at his level of pressure; thin stripes of water pounding against the nape of his neck but nothing stabs through him sharper than the knowledge that he risked a young girl's life to save Castiel and still left him condemned after all.

The water beats down harder, the dull ache numbing the louder pain in his chest. He slumps down against the walls of the bathtub and doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he hears the muffled the sound of Dean yelling his name and banging on the door. Before he can pull himself to his feet he hears the door lock being picked and then Dean comes bursting in just as Sam reaches up and turns off the water.

Sam stands there, dripping wet, watching the fright disappear off his brother’s face.

“I thought…” Dean stammers, simultaneously defensive and embarrassed. “I thought you were…”

“I wouldn’t,” he replies firmly.

Dean sighs, kicking at the water that's flooded the bathroom floor. He manages a weak laugh and throws a towel in Sam's face.

They go to the kitchen and open up a bottle of bourbon.

They drink in silence. Dean says, “give it time.”

It’s a marker of how severe the situation is that his brother has reversed back to empty promises. Hope is the last refuge of the defeated.

“I don’t know if I can,” Sam says into his already empty glass. “Dean, I--”

“No. You need to sleep.” Dean takes a moment to drain his glass before he gets up. He tossels Sam’s wet hair on his way out. “I mean it. Don’t make me tuck you in.”

In the morning Sam guilts himself into checking on Castiel. His blank torment is on him and he should be the one to deal with it.

The last time he was in the room when the Castiel was awake Claire was sitting by the bedside, clutching her stuffed cat. She kept grabbing his hand and pushing into the soft fur of the plushy, telling him, “You gave it to me remember? You said you got it at the Hot Topical, and I acted like I didn’t care, Castiel, but I did, you know. I even brought it to Jody’s with me, you probably didn’t know that, did you? Alex laughed at me when she saw it in my room, she was like ‘this is so dumb’ and it is, y’know, I don’t know why you chose it.”

Castiel had laced his fingers through the synthetic fur, shaking his head. “I don’t remember,” he whispered desperately. “I don’t remember what this is, I don’t know who you are. I don’t remember.”

Standing outside the door now Sam can already hear quiet murmurs and his jaw tightens as he braces himself.

If Castiel is awake, he will balk from him and cry out to be told who and where he is. Eventually Sam will have to leave just so Castiel will calm down enough to fall back asleep. He’ll go to the library where Dean and Mary will join him and they’ll look at the same books they’ve been staring at for the past month and a half, as if something revelatory will suddenly form on those yellowed pages. Claire might be there, too, or she’ll steal away when she thinks they don’t notice and go to Castiel’s room to read him books while he sleeps. More than once Sam’s found a copy of _The Lovely Bones_ left on the bedside table and he didn’t bother suggesting her to read a less somber tale to the sleeping angel.

The doorknob twists slowly in Sam’s hand and he steps through the door, plastering a hopeful smile on his face. His expression immediately collapses when he sees Claire sitting on the edge of the bed next to Castiel. Her head is tucked against his shoulder and arms wrapped around his waist. She’s crying quietly, and Castiel reaches out to brush a sticky lock of hair from the side of her face.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, tucking the strand behind her ear. “I’m so sorry.”

Claire lifts her head up and sees the tall lanky outline through her tear-streaked lashes. “Sam.”

“Sam?” Castiel turns around, his eyes lighting up. _“Sam.”_

Castiel smiles at him.

Castiel, _smiling._ Sam hasn’t seen that in--not seven months, not a year, not since before he was possessed by Lucifer and plagued by a spell and desperate to save Dean and--

“You’re safe,” Castiel goes on, almost incredulous. “I didn’t know if they found you, I hoped they didn’t but-- every day I hoped they wouldn’t find you.”

“Cas,” Sam tries to say but all he hears is a low keening sob breaking from his lips and then he’s running over and reaching out with both hands and burying his face in the folds of that everlasting trench coat. In the back of his mind he faintly thinks that he’ll have to wash the coat after all the snot and saliva and tears that he’s ruining it with. 

_“Cas.”_ He pushes himself up a little, rubbing a sleeve across his eyes. “Cas--you’re--you--”

“Yeah,” Claire sniffles, grinning widely. “It’s him.”

Castiel presses a hand to Sam’s shoulder, his eyes roving back and forth as if checking him for any sign of injuries.

“Cas, you protected me, I’m okay. You kept me and Dean and--”

Color evaporates away from Castiel’s face. “De--he’s _alive?_ ”

When Dean walks into the room the angel jumps up so quickly he almost topples off the bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *long exhale* to everyone who's read this far, thank you and I'm sorry and I love you


	18. Eighteen

They find a way to calm down enough to talk.

Castiel sits on a chair at the head of the table in the library. Mary and Claire are at one side, Sam and Dean on the other. They find themselves strangely somber after the moments of joyful reunion have passed. None of them know how much he remembers, and none of them want to remind him.

The angel takes time to look around the room, his eyes grazing every beam above and board below like he’s registering his surroundings for the first time. He’s confirming reality to himself, Sam thinks. Long ago, between hallucinations of Lucifer, Sam found himself doing the same. You take in the detail of your surroundings to check for any signs, any hints that it’s a fabrication. Only once you’re assured of the genuineness of the structure do you allow yourself to move through it.

“You’re alive,” Castiel says to Dean for the twenty-third time.

“You’re alive,” Castiel says to Mary for the nineteenth time.

“Yeah,” Mary smiles. Her eyes are puffy and bloodshot but she looks radiant. “How are you feeling?”

“Strange.” The angel pauses, closing his eyes. When he opens them his eyes are glowing blue, an ethereal aura that fades in a blink. “My grace is still here. I’d thought he’d taken it all.”

 _Israfiel._ The name sits on the center of Dean’s tongue and he bites down hard on it.

“What do you remember?” Sam asks tentatively. 

Castiel's expression grows distant. “The angels found me after that woman used the banishing spell. They wanted to know where Lucifer was, and where you were,” he nods at Sam. “They didn’t believe me when I told them I didn’t know where Lucifer was. Of course I wouldn’t give you up either. But they kept asking.”

He places his hands on the table, running his fingertips absently over the lines of polished wood. “They took some of my grace. They even had--they worked with demons to try and persuade me. I never really understood why. Every time they handed me over to them it took longer to--” his thumb stills over one jagged line “--recover.”

“Cas, you don’t have to get into all of this now,” Sam says quietly. “Not if you don’t want to. We just need to know if--”

“It’s all gone,” he muses aloud, flexing his fingers carefully. Looking up at their puzzled expressions he adds, “The demon blood. I thought they gave me--it usually takes more time for all traces to leave my grace. You’ve seen what demon blood can do under certain circumstances--” his eyes flick over to Sam “--but for an angel it’s...it burns. It’s in direct opposition to what we are, it takes us apart and incinerates every strand of our being. The first time they did it I almost died.” He tilts his chin down, eyes grazing over the lapels of his coat. “This vessel, it started to rupture from the inside out.”

Sam digs the toes of his shoes into the floor, steeling himself from reacting to the churn in his stomach. He can see from the set of Claire’s shoulders that she’s holding Mary’s hand tightly under the table even as her face pales, tears swimming in her eyes.

“You.” Dean manages to get out the one word while he sits there scraping his knuckles white against each other. _You, not your vessel. You were burning alive from the inside._

Castiellifts his head up. “I didn’t die,” he says quickly, as if to comfort them. “There was one angel. She stopped them, she helped to fix me. I knew her from before. At first I thought she would help me.”

Mary lowers her eyes almost abashedly. _Maribel._

“But she betrayed me in the end. She made me--angels, we keep our wings incorporeal for a reason. To bring them over to this plane is not only painful, but leaves us vulnerable.” Castiel drops his gaze back to the uneven lines of the table. “This angel, she let them force me to materialize my wings again. You don’t understand what that’s like for an angel--thankfully _he_ didn’t touch them that time. He just had me put them back.”

 _Israfiel._ “That was me.” Dean hears himself say. “And Mary. We were scared when you suddenly brought them out--I--you thought I was him.” _Israfiel._ "I told you to put them away and you did because you thought I was…” the word burns the roof of his tongue. _Israfiel._ “You--” he finally wrangles the name loose from his throat “--you called me Israfiel. You thought Mary was some angel called Maribel and that Sam was a demon.”

“What are you--”

“You thought Claire was possessed by a demon, too.” For some reason Dean can't stop. “Every time we tried to help you you thought it was torture. We tried to sedate you because you weren’t healing and--and you thought it was hellfire or demon blood. You were cursed, Cas, they put a curse on you that made you think you were still with there but you were here, man, you were here all along, you were right here--”

The press of Sam’s hand on his shoulder makes him fall silent long enough to inhale.

Castiel is standing up now. The chair he was sitting on now lies toppled over on the floor behind him. His hands are fists digging into the spine of the table’s edge. “How long?”

Sam clenches his jaw around the answer. “Cas, it wasn’t your faul--”

“How long?”

It’s the way Castiel's voice has abruptly dropped , like he himself is terrified to know, that makes Sam confess. “Almost seven weeks,” he begins slowly. “Then we figured out that we could use Claire for the spell to break the curse. But then the last few days you didn’t know who we were at all. It was like removing it did something to your memory. Today was the first day you recognized any of us.”

“I know that much,” Castiel frowns. “I remember the fog of trying to figure out where I was and who you were. But I didn’t know… I didn’t--I thought you were _them_?” 

He turns away from them, head bowed low.

Dean opens his mouth to say something and Sam shakes his head.

After a moment Castiel lifts his head up towards the staircase. His eyes are fixed on the path to the exit and he moves forward to follow it.

“Are you leaving already?” The question comes out before Dean can swallow it down. It’s instinct; it’s a boy waiting by a dirty motel room window, it’s a young man leaving unanswered messages on his father’s phone; it’s how life broke his fingers before he could ever get a hold on it.

The angel hesitates. "No, I'm just going--" his shoulders droop, as if accepting the judgement. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No! No, Cas.” Dean doesn’t even try to hold back the break in his voice. “I never did. I never wanted you to leave, Cas, I never meant--”

“Okay.” Castiel looks at him, unbroken sincerity in those bright blue eyes. “I want to stay.”

It’s just that simple.

It should have always been that simple.

They watch as Castiel moves towards the staircase, one step at a time. His hand ghosts over the staircase railing, like he doesn’t trust anything to hold himself up except his own bent frame. Any minute now Dean’s afraid that Castiel will turn back, that he’ll lapse into the same patterns of fear and illusion that have trapped him for so long. Every stair he walks up is like opening another set of locks, taking apart the prison cell one iron bar at a time. 

Finally he opens the door and it clangs shut behind him, leaving them in an almost reverent silence.

Then they hear it.

A long, shrill sound, coming from beyond the door. It goes on and on.

It’s a roar of laughter. It’s an open-jawed scream.

It’s terrible. It’s glorious.


	19. Nineteen

They find that Castiel hasn’t lost any of his contempt for Crowley.

The two reunite when Sam and Dean call him for updates on Lucifer and he shows up at the Bunker door with Rowena in tow. “Ah, Feathers, I heard you were finally up and about. It pains to admit how much I missed you.”

“Can’t say the same,” Castiel replies snippily as he barely moves aside to let the demon pass down the stairs. Then he notices Rowena and bows his head in gratitude. “Rowena. I heard you helped to find me and also with the spell to recover me. I’m grateful for that.”

The discomfort on Castiel’s face at being indebted to her isn’t missed by either of the brothers and Rowena thankfully doesn’t highlight it. “Ach, it was nothing, tweety-pie,” she laughs, waving a hand. “I’m just delighted to see you looking so well, you had the poor boys moping for so long.”

“Lucifer. Updates.” Dean claps his hands impatiently.

The five of them gather around the table in the main room to discuss and find that there’s little to be said. They still can’t find him, but there’s more recent evidence of the vessels he’s been hopping. Whenever he leaves the vessel the monster activity in the area increases.

“They’re drawn to the power,” Rowena explains.

“All the crawlies come out to find him," Crowley goes on. "But by then he’s long gone. There’s no pattern to the vessels he chooses.”

“Let us be the judge of that,” Sam says, crossing his arms. “Give us the names and we’ll look over it again. Maybe you missed something.”

“The King of Hell doesn’t miss things.” Crowley adjusts his tie and looks down his nose at Sam. “But if it gets you off my back, fine.”

“We should hunt down the monsters, too,” Castiel adds and everyone turns and stares at him.

“We?” Dean echoes.

Sam gives his brother a _“stow it for later”_ look. It holds him back, just long enough until the guests are gone, then Dean ignites the fire again.

“Seriously, Cas? You want to go on hunts already?”

Sam follows up the explosion with a pacifying attempt at “what Dean means is that” and Castiel rolls his eyes exasperatedly before shooting back his own impatient remarks. Mary isn’t there to mediate since she’s driving Claire back to Jody’s, leaving the three of them bickering and trade well-meaning, but poorly worded persuasions at each other.

“We should be looking for the feathered dicks who did this to you and deep-frying them. That’s the priority, Cas,” Dean insists. “We can’t go Devil-hunting if we’re looking over our shoulder for the return of those psychos.”

“You won’t need to,” Castiel sighs. “They’re gone.”

“Gone?” Sam raises an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

“Well, they've had all this time to come and get me but they haven't. Nothing on angel radio either. So they could be in hiding, but mostly likely they’re returned to Heaven.”

“Great, well, guess who’s gonna be knocking on Heaven’s door?”

“Dean.” Castiel rubs the creases of his forehead wearily. “We have more important problems here right now. Lucifer. I let him out of the Cage, it’s my responsibility to find him and fix this mess.”

Dean freezes, fingers wrapped around the back of a chair. He looks utterly stricken. “No. No, no, you--” he wags a finger back and forth, head shaking with equal vehemence. “You can’t say that, Cas, you _can’t_ \--after everything--how could--you still think-- _are you kidding me_?”

“What Dean means,” Sam picks up the pieces of the stammering trail, “is that it’s not your job to find Lucifer, Cas. It’s all of ours. And right now the first priority is you and making sure you’re okay.”

“I am.”

Sam is pretty sure Dean’s going to pop a muscle any minute now.

“It hasn’t even been a week, Cas, not a friggin week, do you know how--”

“Dean.” Castiel reaches out and latches onto his wrist. “Dean,” he repeats, looking him in the eye before turning to the other brother. “Sam. Please. I need to be able to help people. I need--I need a win.”

The frustration immediately evaporates from Dean’s eyes and he looks over at Sam. They know the feeling all too well, the need to put some distance between their own horrors by rescuing someone else from theirs. They agree, reluctantly, to let him join them on the condition that he picks a room in the Bunker for his own. Dean can’t think of him wandering back into the infirmary during the night and sitting back on that wretched bed again.

Castiel picks the room numbered fifteen. “But I don’t sleep,” he protests weakly when they go down the hall.

“This is your home, you gotta take up one corner and start nesting.” Dean opens the door to the room and gestures inside. “You can decorate it, eh? I bet they didn’t let you clutter your room in Heaven.”

“We didn’t have rooms,” Castiel comments as he tiptoes in. “It was more like barracks.” He turns around, silently noting the table and bedside lamp and neatly made bed. With a shift of his right arm his angel blade slides down into his hand. He holds it out at arm’s length, as if considering setting it up as a lone decoration, but then shrugs and pushes it back up his sleeve.

He has nothing of his own, Sam realizes. Castiel could live in that room for years and it would look the same as if he was never there. They need to get him some pictures of them. They need to _take_ some pictures of them. “I’ll get the TV from the guest room,” Sam pipes up, remembering how much the angel seemed to enjoy watching Netflix when he was recovering from Rowena’s spell. He’s halfway to the door when Castiel’s voice makes him turn around

“Sam. Dean.”

The angel is standing in the center of the room, hands clasped in front of him, shoulders bowed, shrinking himself down into a diminutive. “When I was--when I thought you were _them_ ,” he says, and Dean doesn’t miss the emphasis on the pronoun. “Did…did I…did I--did I hurt you? Did I hurt Mary?” His voice splinters a little. “Did I hurt Claire?”

Dean shakes his head hurriedly. “No, Cas, no.”

Sam moves closer, making sure the angel’s eyes are meeting him in the shadow. “Cas, you thought _we_ were hurting _you._ But you never fought us, you never--”

“Okay.” Castiel shuffles away and sits down on the edge of the bed with his back to them. “Thank you.”

Dean’s jaw twitches but he he doesn't remark further as they leave the room, closing the door behind them.

“Give him some time,” Sam says to his brother. This time he knows they can actually afford to. 

Later that night Mary comes home and almost bumps into Castiel who’s trekking noiselessly up and down the hallway.

He smiles at her apologetically. “Can’t sleep?”

“Not really.” She looks up at him in the darkness. “I just got back.” The two of them linger for a moment before Mary says “Do you want to drink some tea with me?”

When they go to the kitchen Castiel picks Earl Grey and she chooses Jasmine Blueberry. Both boxes are from Sam’s side of the kitchen cupboard; Mary never really drinks tea, but she feels like it could be soothing for Castiel. He watches studiously as the water in the kettle bubbles loudly then turns to a hissing steam before she pours it over the herbal pouches.

They take their mugs and sit in the library by the light of one desk lamp. A soft amber glow just bright enough to see each other, yet still allowing plenty of shadows to linger.

Castiel pushes his chair closer towards the dark and Mary doesn’t comment on the distance between them. The air fills with the scented steam of leaves and blossoms and Mary faintly remembers a garden she used to pass by on her way home from school. The old man who lived there always planted roses in three rows in three different colors.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, Mary,” Castiel interrupts her reminiscing. “But…”

“Go on,” she encourages. “I’ll tell you if I’m uncomfortable, okay? Which I’m not.”

He leans back in his chair, further obscuring his face in silhouettes from the bookshelves around them. “It may seem unimportant to you, but--what did I tell you about Maribel?”

Mary takes another sip from her cup before answering. “You mean when you thought I was her?”

He nods.

Mary cradles the mug in both hands. It’s one of Dean’s mugs, a faceless cream-colored cup, likely bought at a wholesale market. The smooth surface radiates warmth between her clammy fingers.

“You don’t have to if it makes you uncomfortable. I’m sorry for asking.” Castiel moves like he’s about to get up and Mary puts up a hand. She doesn’t reach him in the space between, but it’s enough.

“Castiel, you should never be sorry for asking these things. You have every right to know.” The mug sits like a rose blossom in her hand, velvet to the touch, and she tucks her fingers around the handle.

She tells him everything. She tells him the story of the first time Maribel fought by his side; the stories of him healing her from a hellhound bite; the catechism he sang back to her; the way he called her _Mary_ in moments of hope and _Maribel_ in times of fear; the hatred he vocalized when he thought she’d abandoned him; the trust he wanted so badly to give her but couldn’t; the bruises littered along the way.

The pauses when she stops to collect her thoughts offer her no response from the angel but she continues talking. She doesn’t look back at him, keeping her eyes straight ahead until she finishing recalling the last tale.

Castiel doesn’t make a single sound, much less comment.

 _Maybe he needs a moment alone,_ she thinks, and puts her cup to rest on the table.

The angel remains seated, eyes cast down to his lap and she walks past him with a hushed “goodnight Castiel.”

Just before her foot clears the edge of the library she hears a slight movement perforating the stillness behind her. She turns around to see Castiel bent over in his chair. Shadows cascade down his back and disappear at the hem of his trench coat sleeves. His face is buried in his hands and his shoulders are shaking.

She goes back, she kneels down, she wraps her arms around him and he sinks into her, weeping against the ballast of her beating heart.


	20. Twenty

They realize that Castiel is still as badass as ever.

Sam comments on Dean’s statement, asking “why wouldn’t he be?”

“Because,” Dean shrugs as he wipes their matchetes clean and puts them back into the trunk of the car. They just finished taking out a vampire nest and Castiel is by the side of the road, healing the wounds of the three teenagers they rescued. “ _Because_.”

Dean keeps waiting for the “because” to show up. It’s been ten days since the curse was broken and the angel seems back to the full extent of his endearing self. He goes with them on hunts, he plays the part of an FBI agent with his patented combination of awkwardness and intimidation, and he joins them for the post-hunt beers. 

It’s good. It’s wrong.

It’s wrong to be so good.

Sam doesn’t think so. He doesn’t contradict Dean, though. He’s scared to jinx the bend in the road they’ve finally come upon; by verbalizing his concern it might suddenly shift the prism and the road will become a downhill slope again. So they carry on, holding on to this return to normalcy with equal amounts of gratitude and trepidation.

They try not to talk about the little glitches. Like a few days ago when they finished taking out a family of shapeshifters. While the boys changed out of their goop-splattered clothes Sam noticed that the cut on Castiel's face was still sluggishly bleeding.

“Cas, is your grace okay?” he ventured.

“Yes, it is intact.”

Dean tossed over a first aid kit from his duffle bag. “He means do you need help patching that up, dumbass.”

“Patching up--oh.” Castiel raised a finger to the wound, as if noticing it for the first time. “I forgot,” he mumbled. Instantly the skin knit together, every vestige of blood disappearing in a flash.

The brothers exchanged looks over his head but said nothing. But it happened a second time, and the third time Castiel doesn't heal himself after a hunt Sam has to ask.

“What did you mean,” he begins, leaning back from the passenger’s seat, “that you forgot?”

“Oh.” If Sam is seeing right he would say the angel looks almost embarrassed. “It’s nothing. It won't happen again.”

Sam raises an eyebrow at Dean, giving him the cue to back him up.

“Cas, you know you can tell if anything’s wrong," Dean says, glancing up at the rearview mirror. "If your grace is still damaged from the curse we can ask Rowena about a--”

“My grace is fine,” Castiel interrupts hurriedly. “I just forget to use it sometimes. When I was--when they had me, I didn’t use it.”

“Yeah, we noticed.” Sam twists around in his seat, trying to make eye contact with him. “Is it something like you get out of practice if you don’t use it for awhile?”

Castiel doesn’t answer until they’ve crossed the next red light. “Our grace, it acts instinctively,” he begins, pressing his head against the window. “Whenever there’s damage to our vessel or being it flows there immediately. It’s as natural as breathing. To not heal, to keep it from doing that function, would be like squeezing your own hand around your throat.”

“That’s--” Dean tightens his hold on the steering wheel. “Cas, why the hell would you do that?”

“I had to. I had to learn to how when I was--whenever I used my grace to heal myself after--they would not be pleased. Sometimes the habit--I forget. I forgot,” he repeats, his low breath fogging a small circle on the windowpane. “I won’t forget again.”

Dean shakes his head, lips taunt and eyes ablaze. Almost every time Castiel talks to them another horror is unmasked, another atrocity he experienced that Dean is again powerless to stop or prevent. He needs to find the ones who did this to their friend, he needs to be able to slide a blade into their heart and watch the relief cross Castiel's face as the light burns from their eyes. The fact that they haven't been able to locate even one of the angel's tormentors is yet another burning log on the fire flaring through his chest.

Sam reaches back and rests a hand on his knee. Castiel notices the gesture, his expression softening into a look of gratitude. He offers Sam the trace of a smile before changing the topic. “Claire said she might come by the Bunker later, is Mary cooking dinner again?”

Mary has started cooking again, just to prove to Dean she’s always been a disaster in the kitchen. Dean usually takes over halfway through just to show off. Sam obligatorily complains about the lack of vegetables once the meal is served. Castiel does the dishes because he “finds the sound of running water to be soothing” and they let him because they know he wants to feel part of the family event, too.

Sometimes Mary joins him to help dry the dishes afterwards because it’s nice to feel like they’re in a home, an ordinary home and not in a secret underground bunker where nearly every load of laundry is covered in blood and literal guts.

Once when she and Castiel are in the kitchen he suddenly stops and just stares at the ketchup streaked plate in his hand.

When Mary calls his name he answers with “Maribel.”

At least, she _thinks_ she heard him say that.

Dean spends his time between hunts tinkering with the hood of the impala. He wants to find a way to get better warding in the vehicle, to keep them hidden from angels and demons and Lucifer. Castiel comes by and watches from time to time, hands in his pockets and refusing Dean’s requests to “mojo” his greasy palms clean.

There’s a look in those blue eyes that sometimes makes Dean remember a voice much colder; how the same angel standing there once uttered insults and a syllable of _“you”_ spoken with unmeasurable contempt. He doesn’t let Castiel know how at times he still finds himself jolting at the arrival of his presence or how the name _Israfiel_ rips through his nightmares.

Sam practices his newfound Enochian skills with Castiel every chance he can get. He wants to perfect his pronunciation, his understanding of the language. He tells Dean and Mary it's to help them find Lucifer but in the back of his mind he thinks if he also thinks it might help him be able to track down Israfiel and Maribel, or at the least keep them from ever coming anywhere near to Castiel again. So he spends his free afternoons hunched over translations and books again, this time with the angel at his side.

One day Sam asks about names in Enochian and learns that there’s no word for the species angel or demon in Enochian. There are only the names of specific angels and demons. “What’s your name in Enochian?” he wonders and Castiel utters seven syllables that resonate with vowels of divinity.

When Sam tries to pronounce it the angel suddenly grows stern. “Don’t say it,” he warns.

It’s probably some part of angelic cultural taboo he doesn’t know about, Sam figures. It’s not because he still sees him as a demon with filth soiling his veins. It’s _not_.

Sam changes the topic to ask about Enochian protection spells, but now he can’t shake the burgeoning reminder of everything that was said when Castiel was still under the curse. There are questions that he’s tucked into the corners of his mind’s file cabinets and they’ve all come loose now, fluttering in the breeze beyond the reach of his fingers. 

Before Castiel leaves to check the Bunker’s inventory of holy oil Sam lets one question slip. “Cas,” he begins. “Did you really think we wouldn’t ever--did you think we wouldn’t find you?”

Castiel pauses for a moment, standing in the doorway with his back to him. “I hoped you wouldn’t. That would have been exactly what they wanted. I didn’t know Dean was alive, of course, but I hoped you wouldn’t keep searching for me.”

Sam runs a hand through his hair--or pulls it, really. “You know I’d never stop looking, Cas. I wouldn’t just let you die.”

Castiel turns around with a frown. “I wouldn’t have died, not for another two years. Judging by the amount of grace they were taking it would take around seven hundred days for me to not be able to replenish it anymore. Then my human body would easily succumb to exposure or blood loss.”

 _Death is not a strategy,_ Sam wants to say, but what comes out is a stunned sputter of “two years?”

The comment reaches the angel’s ears in a different tone, it seems, because Castiel immediately narrows his eyes like he’s about to deliver a lecture. “Two years wouldn’t have been a waste, Sam. I would be keeping not just you safe for those two years, but also the people you love. As long as they had me they wouldn’t go after Jody or Claire or anyone else to try to get to you. That’s not nothing.”

“That’s crap, Cas, because you’re forgetting something in your plan.” Dean marches into the room waving a finger and from the look on his face it’s clear he’s been listening longer than just the last line. “ _You_. Cas, it’s not okay for you to sacrifice yourself to save us.”

“You’re part of the people we love,” Sam adds. “You know that, right?”

It’s supposed to be a rhetorical question.

It’s not supposed to be a question that makes the angel stall, as if deliberating the answer to.

Dean opens and shuts his mouth noiselessly.

“I love you,” Castiel says quietly. “I love all of you. And I won’t let any of you die, not again. You mean...” he swallows hard. “You mean too much to me.”

“What about what you mean to us? Cas, what you do for us--” _no it’s not just that_ “--who you are--” _yes_ “--it’s never nothing. It’s everything.” He doesn't realize that he’s moving forward until he’s right in front of Castiel. “I don’t care what’s happening, what angels or demons or if God himself is after us, we would _never_ leave you behind.”

“Yeah,” Dean chimes in huskily from behind him. “Screw keeping us safe, buddy, we can take care of ourselves. We’re here to watch out for you.”

“That’s not your job,” the angel protests.

“It’s not yours either.” Sam puts a hand on his arm, holding onto that trenchcoat sleeve like he can keep him from ever slipping away again. “It’s something we all do. We’re family and we look out for each other.”

“Okay,” Castiel nods. There’s still some lingering doubt in his eyes, but Sam lets it go. He knows that it takes time to unlearn the language of self-hate and stop subtracting yourself from the equations others add you to.

“He really didn’t know,” Dean mutters after the angel has excused himself to go do the inventory. “Sammy, he--”

“I know.” 

They don’t know. That’s what they’re starting to learn.


	21. Twenty-One

They find another recently burned-out vessel.

This time the monsters converging for the power residue are werewolves in Maine. Dean declares that they should make it a family hunting trip so all four of them go. It doesn’t take long for them to realize it’s not one pack of wolves, but three.

“Good thing we brought the big guns,” Dean ribs Castiel with his elbow and the angel blinks twice before responding with an expression that tries to be a smile.

“Is he okay?” Sam asks when they’re out of his earshot.

Dean shrugs. “Been asking myself that for the last two weeks.”

“Thirteen days,” Sam corrects him. He’s been keeping a careful timeline of the days passed since the curse was broken. It feels like a countdown; to what he doesn’t know.

Dean packs another cartridge of silver bullets into the bag hanging off his arm and shuts the hood of the trunk down. “Well, we’re here now and we gotta save some people. We can try and talk to him once we get back.”

Two of the werewolf packs are camped out in an old barn just off the main road. Mary and Castiel go in from one entrance, Sam and Dean from the other. There’s a couple tied to one of the support beams and Mary runs to free them while silver bullets soar like a flock of birds through the air. The other couple that was reported missing has already been bitten and are in the middle of turning. Aborted screams twist their lips as they writhe under the moonlight beaming through a crack in the roof. It’s not quite a full moon but the transformation is already happening.

A mutated strain, Sam figures as he ducks and rolls beneath the swing of a towering werewolf wearing a white tank top. They should have known something was different from the number of werewolves gathered; the pack probably wanted to use the residual power to mutate further. Castiel is trying to heal the half-deformed couple, his eyes blazing blue and fingertips digging against their foreheads. Dean yells for him to duck as a werewolf bares her teeth a few inches away from the angel’s throat. It’s the reckless yet intricate symmetry of all their fights, the combination of practice and dogged determination that makes their team work.

Then something stops. A piece falls out of the chain.

The air brims with static energy and the whip of long screech prickles at their ears.

Mary is leading the freed couple to safety outside when she hears it. She comes running back into the barn to see Sam covering his ear with one hand and gesticulating wildly with the other. Pulling him up the arm Mary asks what’s wrong.

Her son‘s lips form a word she doesn’t need to hear to understand.

_Cas._

A pop resounds through her left eardrum as the air pressure increases and she throws a hand over one ear while holding her gun up and scanning the shadows around her. Dean is staring at the center of the room, blood dripping off his split lip, smoking weapon in hand. The other werewolves are pressed up against the walls, caught between awe and terror.

Giant black shapes fill the space in front of her.

The shapes rustle, light dipping between the dark eaves.

She moves closer to see Castiel kneeling on the straw-matted floor, his head dipped down.

“Take them,” the angel demands lowly, spreading his threadbare wings to their full height. “Just take them.”

The words freeze on Mary’s tongue. She can’t get out much more than a thin gasp. 

Castiel snaps his head up. “ _Maribel_. Is it going to be your hand that plucks me clean tonight?” He twists his neck around to face a speechless Dean. “You might as well feed me to them. It would give you the same result. I cannot tell you where Lucifer is and I will not--”

A flash of plaid sweeps past Mary and she recognizes it as Sam barreling past her and straight for Castiel. Before she can stop him he grabs the angel’s face in his hands, saying “it’s not real, you’re not there, we’re here, Cas, we’re here, we’re _here_.”

Mary springs into actions, shooting the other two werewolves when they attempt to move away. Dean takes out the last one behind him. Then they converge towards Castiel, holding him in a circle of overlapping arms and repeating reassurances until they feel something brushing against their backs. Something soft and fragile, reaching around all of them. They don’t need to look to know that he’s encircling them with his wings.

Abruptly the appendages disappear and the angel sits mutely on the barn floor until they pull him to his feet.

“What happened?” Dean asks him as he guides him back to the car. “Was it--was it something I said? Was it something about the barn that--”

“I don’t.” Castiel’s eyes wide and blank. “I don’t know.”

Castiel refuses to speak on the ride home. No one objects to the radio filling the dialogue for them. When they get back to the Bunker Dean goes to put their bags away only to drop them and sprint back down the hall at the sound of Mary calling him. There's panic over every syllable of her words.

He pulls up short where she’s standing, just in the entrance of the infirmary.

Inside the infirmary, on a single neatly made bed, sits Castiel, his blue eyes zeroed in on some distant hairline fracture in the paint of the wall. He doesn’t look at Dean when he speaks. “You let those abominations touch my wings today,” he intones listlessly. “You don’t even care about finding Lucifer anymore. This is about me, isn’t it? This is my punishment for betraying Heaven.”

 _No._ The word comes tearing up Dean’s throat.

It was over. It was supposed to be _over_. 

Castiel’s voice grows heavy. “I don’t serve Heaven, Israfiel. I have not for years. If you think you can persuade me to change allegiances now than you are more of a fool than I had thought. Better angels than you have tried and failed.”

Dean goes outside into the library and smashes two chairs before Sam manages to stop him.

Castiel remains unmoved up through the next morning. By the time it’s the afternoon and nothing they’ve said has been able to perforate the state the angel has regressed to, they have to call Jody. No one sleeps that night. Sam reorganizes the ingredients for the spell half a dozen times. Dean paces up and down outside the closed door of the infirmary and Mary makes tea that no one drinks. She finally finishes two cups of Earl Grey by herself.

Jody arrives with Claire the next morning. She stays for the process this time, standing hand in hand with Claire just outside the room when the boys go to inject Castiel with the spell. 

The moment Sam comes within a foot of the bed Castiel rolls up his sleeve and holds out his arm with that same resigned expression of silenced terror.

Sam drops the syringe, blood and glass splashing over his shoes.“I can’t do this again, I can’t, I can’t,” he murmurs, trying to scoop up the pieces with his bare hands. "Not again, _please_ , not again." His blood and Claire’s mingle in a mosaic of pain and Mary rushes over.

“Sam, stop,” she urges, pulling his hands away.

Jody helps to administer the blood once they refill the syringe. She tries to remain impassive as Castiel calls her a “pathetic doomed soul with no mind of your own, blindly following the command of angels who would sooner smite you than deliver on their word.”

“So I’m a demon,” Jody comments to Claire who’s still standing in the doorway .

“Don’t feel too bad about it,” Claire tries to shrug, her eyes watering faintly. She moves over to sit beside Jody, watching the blood drain from the syringe and into Castiel’s veins. When Jody pulls out a cotton swab Claire holds out a hand to take it. As she holds it down over the puncture wound she leans her head on Jody’s shoulder and closes her eyes.

“He’ll be alright,” Jody says softly and Claire is thankful for the lie right now.

“Claire?”

Her hand jumps at the sound and she opens her eyes cautiously.

Castiel shifts on the bed, moving to sit up and put his legs over the edge. He looks from Jody to Claire, seemingly puzzled. Then his gaze falls to the little bit of cotton stuck to the crook of his arm and his expression immediately crumbles. “Oh no. Did I-I didn’t. _Claire_. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry--”

“Shut up, old man,” she grins, throwing her arms around him.

Two weeks later Castiel is back in the infirmary, staring vacantly at the wall.


	22. Twenty-Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the continued angst guys this is how I understand comfort

They discover that it’s not hallucinations.

“It’s like one reality starts to overlay the other.” Castiel moves two pieces of paper over the table as he speaks. “It starts at the edges and then eventually completely replaces it. When you give me the spell--” he swipes one paper off to the side “--there’s suddenly only one. For awhile, at least.”

It’s the third time they’ve had to readminister the spell. At least it only takes a single syringe to pull Castiel out of what Dean’s calling the “second wave.” Sam says that’s not a good name because it’s already past that number. 

“The spell called for a life force given, right?” Castiel furrows his brow. “What Claire is giving doesn’t necessarily match that. Maybe that’s why it still has a recurring hold on me.”

They settle on calling it “recurrences.”

Castiel objects to letting them know when the recurrences happens. “You shouldn’t give me the spell anymore,” he says firmly. “Just--Sam, I know you have an Enochian spell for sedating me. Just do that, keep me under as long as necessary. This body--” he grazes a hand over the lapels of his coat “--it won’t die. I can look over the spell and adapt it to only draw minimally on my grace. This vessel will not fail and can keep me safe while being sedated. For years if necessary.”

“We are _not_ going to put you in a coma, Cas,” Sam says, horrified

“Not when we have a solution right here.” Dean gestures towards Claire who nods adamantly.

“No. _No._ I can’t accept that. Not anymore.” The angel looks over apologetically to both Jody and Claire. “I am immensely grateful for what you’ve done for me, Claire. But you’re a child. You should not be coming here and having your blood taken for…” he pauses. “You deserve a life free from all this. From me.”

“Not your choice, old man.” Claire tries to sound hard but her voice is too soft to form edges.

“She won’t even have to come here every time,” Sam speaks up. “We’ll withdraw enough for a couple of doses so she’ll only have to drop by every few months. It won’t affect her schooling in any way. With Jody’s permission, of course.”

“As long as you need it, you have my support,” the sheriff nods. “But it’s Claire’s decision, in the end.”

“And you can take time to make that decision,” Mary adds.

“I’ve already made my decision, and you know what is.” Claire sits up up a little straighter. “Castiel, this is my choice to help and--”

Castiel backs away from the table, shaking his head vehemently. “No, no, no. Sam. Dean. Please just put me under when I--” he wets his lip. “The next time it happens put me under permanently. It’s simpler that way. It’s better.”

“Better for who?” Dean challenges.

“For you,” he answers without hesitation. “I know what I’ve said to you, when I think you’re…them. I know how it must linger even afterwards, I know--I know what I’ve taken from you,” he goes on, directing his gaze to Claire. “I can’t ask this of you.”

“You’re not asking, I’m giving it to you!” Claire is standing up now, arms crossed and sparks glinting in those emerald eyes.

“Not from you, Claire. I can't.” He drops his eyes down, turning away slightly. “I can’t--I don’t deserve it.”

“Neither do I.” Sam’s voice from the other end of the table makes Castiel look up.

“Sammy,” Dean protests quietly.

“No, listen, I don’t deserve what you went through for me, Cas. You know, it’s not what you said to me when you thought I was a demon that messes me up the most.” He swallows hard for a second, keeping his eyes on the angel and ignoring the gaze of everyone in the room. “It’s knowing that for six months you were tortured and torn apart and--” he pinches his fingers to his nose “--all to protect me. Everything you’re going through right now is because of _me_ and--and there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wish you had just given me up. You should have, long ago.”

“That is not your choice,” Castiel almost growls. “That was my choice. I would never give you up. That is not the same as the situation here. You know what I did to Claire’s family. I can’t ask this of her, of any of you. I _can’t_ ,” he repeats, suddenly looking very small and almost on the verge of tears. “You have a world to save, you need to fight and I can’t help you like this, I would just--” turning around he shuffles ever closer to the wall. “Please. The next time it happens should be the last.”

Dean flips through the arguments in his mind, trying to pull up one that might convince Castiel that he doesn’t deserve to be imprisoned in his own body for the rest of his life. Somehow all he can think of is himself standing in a barn eight years ago face to face with the one who pulled him out of hell and hearing him say _What’s the matter? You don’t think you deserve to be saved?_

Then he understands. Dean stands up and moves forward. He puts a hand on Castiel’s shoulder, feeling the shift of muscles tensed beneath his fingers. “It’s not true,” he says. “Whatever they told you, whatever you’re telling yourself, it’s not true. You don’t deserve it, not a single thing that they did to you. You don’t deserve to suffer for the rest of your life because of it. You _don’t_.”

Castiel shifts, glancing at him for a moment and it’s the look in his eyes that breaks Dean. He’s seen that exact same expression in the mirror and on his little brother’s face.

He pulls the angel into a hug, wrapping his arms around him like a promise. “It’s not true,” he says again into his ear because God knows how long it took for him to believe it, if he ever did. But if he can convince his best friend to believe it even for a moment then that’s already a victory. “It’s not true, Cas. Trust me, it’s not.”

It takes a second for Castiel to reach up and hug him back. His fingers clutch at fistfuls of shirt like a lifeline.

Before Jody and Claire have to head back to Sioux Falls that night Castiel agrees to accept Claire’s blood for the spell. He doesn’t know when the next recurrence might happen, though; he isn’t aware of when the realities start to overlap, just that they do. 

Between Mary and the boys they decide to keep a chart to count the days between each recurrence. They show it to Castiel after each recurrence but he can never remember what he did or what might have triggered it. As the days pass they watch him for signs like he’s a weather vane; any slight tilt to the left or right could be an indicator. Eventually a pattern starts to emerge; it starts off in fading eye contact, physical withdrawal from their space, then progresses to verbal slip ups and muscles tensing.

He always ends up back in the infirmary.

They try not to let it get to that stage, but Castiel often asks them to wait. Either he’s loathe to acknowledge his decline or he doesn’t realize the severity of it.

“Not yet,” he begs. “I’m still doing fine.”

None of them have the heart to tell him the truth. So when the signs start increasing in frequency they shift their schedule accordingly; they go on less hunts, or make sure there are always two people left in the bunker, and they do everything short of grounding him to keep him there.

“I’m fine,” he says like a prayer.

One time Dean loses it and fires back with “No, you’re not.”

He feels the acid on his tongue the minute the words leave his mouth. Mary shakes her head at him with obvious disappointment and Dean doesn’t even try to rectify his words. It’s out there around, lengthening into a noose around the angel’s neck.

As the weeks go by the length of days between each recurrence grows longer and longer. Sam shares the observation excitedly with Castiel, telling him that “you went for almost twenty days this time.”

“Twenty days?” the angel croaks in disbelief. There’s not a drop of celebration in his voice.

“Yeah, Cas, it means you’re getting better! It means that someday soon you won’t need any spell injections at all.” 

Castiel looks at Sam like he just told him that dolphins can climb stairs.


	23. Twenty-Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry it took awhile to update this time

They find that they’re out of Earl Grey.

Sam tells Mary that the angel can drink Jasmine Blueberry for once.

Mary stops by Castiel’s room every few days for tea. Neither of them are actually particularly interested in drinking the beverage but it’s become part of the ritual for them. She finds time in the evenings and comes to sit on his bed and drink in silence, or until she falls asleep on his shoulder.

Other times Mary tells him stories about carrying Dean on her shoulder when he was a boy; how they prepared the room when she got pregnant with Sam and how Dean scribbled on the first three attempts they made at wallpapering the room. How Dean didn’t want to let go of Sam the first time he held him, and how John taught him how to carve his and his brother’s initials in the side of the crib.

It’s the memories she doesn’t share with the boys. They’re too weighted in grief that it would be heard as a loss and without the beauty of their existence in themselves. Castiel always listens with careful attentiveness; even when she gets choked up he never makes her feel ashamed of feeling sorry for herself. He takes the mug of tea from her trembling hands so she can hide her face and cry, as if he understands the need to conceal the rush of emotions. He waits until she’s composed herself and then he’ll return the cup to her along with two squares of neatly folded tissues and it feels like the warmest hug.

Some days Castiel will be the storyteller, telling her his own secrets in Enochian. He doesn’t translate, and she doesn’t ask him to. He only ever tells it when he thinks she’s asleep. She was drifting in and out of sleep when she heard him the first time. Now all she needs to do is close her eyes and he might start talking. Her study of Enochian gives her enough basics to understand the outline of the stories; they’re recollections, at times; confessions on other days. The language crosses his lips with reverence and emotion, at once holy and intimate. It hurts to listen to, and yet she holds onto every word.

Today when she stops by she hears him talking aloud in Enochian. It makes her pause briefly before knocking and then opening the door when he says “come in.”

“Hey,” she smiles, holding the steaming mugs up. “You okay with jasmine today? We’re out of Earl Grey.”

He nods and she settles in on the blankets beside him. Her head drops down wearily on her shoulder and she stifles a yawn. It’s been a sequence of exhausting days following leads on Lucifer that still lead nowhere. Steam wafts up from the mug in her hands, misting up her fluttering eyelashes.

“Who were you talking to?” she asks even as she mentally reminds herself that he just got injected with the spell yesterday. It’s such cruelty that they have to question which reality their friend is in but it’s become almost instinctive now

“I was praying. To Maribel.”

“Why?”

She feels him shrug underneath her cheek. “I know she didn’t answer your summoning spells, but I just wanted to…I just want to know if she’s alive.”

 _Why_ _,_ Mary thinks again.

“You want to know why,” the angel grins wryly. “I know it’s not easy to understand, especially after everything she was a part of. But I still want to know if she’s alright. It’s stupid, I know.”

“It’s not.” Sitting up she pulls the blanket tighter around her knees. Her face flushes with the steam as she blows on the tea in the mug, condensation settling on the tip of her nose. “You loved her. She hurt you but you still care. That’s not stupid, that’s…” _human_ , she thinks. “That’s real.”

He drinks from his cup without waiting for it to cool down. “She witnessed almost everything that happened to me without stopping them. I know she was just following orders. She knew--” he gestures to himself “--what would happen if she interfered. I can’t fault her for that.”

“You can, if you want to. Whatever you feel about her is fair.”

The tea finally cools enough to drink. Mary takes a tentative sip to find it’s just the right temperature. 

“She watched the demons pull my limbs off one by one,” Castiel says.

Mary slips her free hand into his and squeezes gently. _You’re here,_ she tells herself as much as him. _You’re here and you’re safe._

He returns the gentle pressure before continuing. “I didn’t die, of course, because my grace was rushing to heal the wounds even as they were made. I couldn’t reach for her and I couldn’t--I couldn’t call out because--they--my lungs--but my eyes could move. I could see her. She was there. It went on for hours and she didn’t look away, not once.”

She presses her shoulder against his. “How did that make you feel?”

Castiel looks away. His jaw works a little, clenching and loosening repeatedly. His eyes flit over the dark spaces of the room, traveling from wall corner to ceiling shadows. “I remember thinking that I wasn’t alone.”

She feels him holding her hand tighter even as his voice remains steady. “When the pain was that intense, sometimes I would lose the ability to recognize who or where I was. Seeing her there, I knew that she wouldn’t let me die. She would make them stop before it happened. She stopped them before so there was the promise that she could do it again. I could wait for that. I could hold on to that, even when it felt like I was dying.”

It takes everything she has not to let her trembling hand spill the tea from her mug. “Castiel, I’m sorry,” Mary whispers, blinking hard. A few tears slip out and roll down her cheek anyways. “I’m so sorry.”

He leans over and presses a small folded tissue into her other hand. “Thank you,” he says quietly.

They don’t say anything more as they drink their tea. When he finally empties his mug he sets it down on the bedside table with a small frown. “I don’t prefer the taste of Jasmine Blueberry. We should tell Sam to get extra boxes of Earl Grey next time.”

“He says we went through his shelf too quickly this month,” Mary remarks and they both laugh.

Another month goes by.

Castiel doesn’t have another recurrence.

Everyone is too cautious to celebrate, but the lightness rises anyways.

Even with Lucifer still out there. There’s still no progress on his whereabouts and Crowley suggests that he might have been taken back to Heaven. Castiel says he would know if that happened; it would be all over angel radio. Rowena declares that it’s much more likely that he's gotten himself stuck in some supernatural trap. An archangel in their true form is susceptible to all kinds of attacks.

They pass the warning message along the hunter network, along with a set of warding sigils to hide the hunters from the runaway archangel. It’s a project that Sam and Castiel have been working on for several weeks now. Claire gets the message when she’s just a few miles away from the Bunker. She’s on her way to pick up her own set of Enochian dictionaries, or that’s what she tells the boys when she calls them. Sam keeps a steady supply of books on the library table so she can claim that she has to drop by whenever she wants. He knows that she’s somehow still embarrassed to admit that she just wants to check up on Castiel. 

Whenever Claire comes by Castiel always asks for one of the brothers or Mary to be there with him. He doesn’t so much ask as hover patiently by them until they accompany him into the library or kitchen or whichever room Claire is rummaging around in. “Just to be safe,” he told Dean one time when the older Winchester protested. “Please.”

He’s terrified of hurting the people he loves, Dean realized. It’s a fear that lingers in the back of angel’s eyes at all times but rises to the surface especially around her.

But this time when Claire comes over there’s only Castiel sitting at the table in the main room. Mary opened the door for her but didn’t linger; she had snapped the welding mask back over her eyes and hurried off, muttering something about sigils and the cars in the garage.

“Claire.” Castiel stands up quickly, shifting his eyes back and forth. “Sam and Dean aren’t here.”

“I know,” she smiles breezily. “They said I could come by. Gotta restock my angel library.”

“Oh.” He remains standing, hands pinned to his side. “Of course.”

She moves over to the little pile of books at the edge of the table. There’s a yellow Post-It note pinned to the top; scribbled in Sam’s writing is something about there being dinner in the fridge if she wants to stay longer and an additional _p.s._ warning from Dean to stay out of his beer and whiskey.

“Do you need help carrying the books out to your,ah, car?”

“I’m not--” Claire looks up and sees Castiel still rooted in place, every muscle in his body locked like he’s one blink away from a nervous spasm. “Tryna chase me out already?” she jokes.

“No, of course not.” He lowers his eyes. “Claire, Sam and Dean aren’t here.”

She puts the book down. “I know, Castiel.” When she moves a step closer his body leans away even as his feet stay planted on the floor.

She hesitates, trying to think of how to put him at ease. “Okay, look, when was the, um, the last time?” The day count between recurrences is a number she knows by heart, but if she can get him to verbalize the fact it might help him accept that he’s safe to be around.

His eyes move to the calender hanging off a hook on the wall where the days have been circled in red marker. “Four weeks and six days.”

“See?” Her foot nudges half an inch along the floor tiles. “I trust you, alright?”

“I don’t. Trust myself.”

“Well, looks like I’ll have to do the trusting for both of us then.” When he doesn’t look any more reassured Claire frowns, chewing on her lower lip. “Look, even if you were…even if you were having a recurrence, you wouldn’t hurt me. You didn’t that time. In fact you tried to bargain for my life. You were ready to give them everything--” she can still hear him begging, _take it, wings, grace, me_ “--you were ready to let them take you down to hell. For me.”

Castiel fidgets, his fingers uncoiling to toy with the hem of his coat. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“Yeah, I know. Still.” She shrugs and slides a hand along the backs of the wooden chairs. “You tried to save whoever you thought I was. You never even came close to hurting me, okay? You never will.”

By now she’s shifted enough small steps forward to bring her almost right next to him. He doesn’t unfurl the tightness of his shoulders but doesn’t move away either. There’s a spread of parchments and paper over his side of the table and she leans over one, squinting to get a better look.

“Is that your handwriting?” When Castiel nods she traces a finger under the elegant lines. It’s nothing like her father’s handwriting; the careful, swirling ink marks are soaked into the parchment paper. “You gotta show me how you get my writing to look like that. What’s the secret of the fancy little hat on the top of the ‘A’?”

Castiel hesitates and she tugs at his sleeve until he comes over and sits down on the chair beside her.“It’s, ah, a habit of mine from the Enochian alphabet.” He fumbles a little with the pen but there’s a timid smile on his face. “I don’t mean to, it just happens to turn out like that.”

She watches how he puts his elbow up on the table when he writes, the same way her father used to, but the strokes are completely different. Even his hand looks different; more wrinkled, somehow, against all logic. He doesn’t have the gaunt appearance he did when she first saw him in the infirmary over two months ago, but the lines of fatigue still haunt the crevices of his eyes.

He looks older than her father ever did.

Angels aren’t supposed to age; then neither are they supposed to die and get put back together over and over, or survive torture and resist brainwashing by their family. They aren’t supposed to spend years on Earth, cut off from the power of their home and traveling in a vessel bound by flesh and bone. They’re not supposed to look at you with that sheepish little look of eager hope, they’re not supposed to find a way into your heart despite how many times you try to close it off to them. They're not supposed to care so much that they're willing to live through an eternity of hell to protect the ones they love. 

She reaches over and takes the pen from him. “My turn now. You better tell me I’m doing a good, ‘kay, even if I’m not.”

He looks at her, the smile finally reaching his eyes. “You’re always doing a good job, Claire.”


	24. Twenty-Four

They still can’t find Israfiel or Maribel.

Dean tries to summon them repeatedly over the sound of Castiel reminding him that they’ve probably returned to Heaven. “They wouldn’t have left me unguarded like that. By the time you found me they must have been gone,” he tells him, leaning up against the door frame with hands in his pocket. “They knew they didn’t have to be there in person to torture me.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Dean sighs. 

“Or they’re in hiding from Heaven’s wrath. Those in charge would not be kind to those who failed their mission, and Israfiel definitely failed in securing Lucifer.” Castiel tilts his head to the side. “Well, and punishing me, but I don’t know if that was one of his orders. It felt personal.”

Dean stops chanting the spell.

Castiel goes on, unfazed. “Of course, it could be that the demons and angels ended up killing each other, but you’d see the aftermath of an attack like that. Forces of heaven and hell pitted directly against each other, there’d be blood in the rain and sulfur in the water. There wasn’t any of that in the area you found me, was there?”

“No.” Dean manages a grin. “Glass half full, right?”

Crowley can’t find the demons that collaborated with the angels either, and when Castiel suggests that the angels smote them long before their deal was over the king of Hell looks unimpressed. “You halo types have no imagination,” he grunts. “I’d have done much worse than a half-assed smiting.”

“I would have appreciated that,” Castiel says sincerely and Dean can’t help but grin behind the book he’s reading. He never thought he’d see the day where Crowley was offering to enact revenge on Castiel’s behalf.

A few nights later Dean’s in the middle of opening a new bottle of whiskey when Castiel comes into the kitchen, floorboards creaking under the methodical placement of his steps. He has his hands in his coat pockets and smiles faintly when he sees Dean

“Sure,” Castiel answers to the raised bottle and questioning eyebrow.

It’s definitely not what the angel is here for, but Dean pours him a glass anyways. Castiel must be here because he wants something; more likely he wants to ask him about something. Maybe advice about Claire, or his idea of carrying a syringe of angel sedative in the trunk. Both brothers already rejected the suggestion more than once, with Sam emphasizing that “you don’t even need it anymore.” Castiel persisted in needling them with the warning “in case” over and over to no avail. If he’s hoping to catch Dean off guard one-on-one it won’t work.

Castiel takes a seat on the bench across from him and starts talking about angel grace, spouting facts like an infomercial. Dean is certain this isn’t what he really wants to talk about, but he listens and nods. He’s just hoping that this doesn’t develop into another painstakingly reconstructed description of the torture he went through under Israfiel and his team of minions. 

Just last week they’d been discussing what kind of traps to use when they found Lucifer and Castiel mentioned, and then went on to recount in detail, a sigiled trap Israfiel had used on him that pulls an angel’s grace in six different directions while still keeping it trapped within its vessel, making it feel like “a thousand deaths happening all at once.” Even Crowley who had been there to help them with a parchment translation had looked slightly appalled, although if it was because of the torture or the openness with which Castiel talked about it, Dean couldn’t tell. What he did know was that now there was a persistent shadow of dread that trailed after every conversation he started with the angel. He knew Castiel wasn’t telling them those stories to add onto their guilt for not rescuing him sooner, but every time it still landed with the weight of a milestone around his neck.

This time is different, though; Castiel starts off with a hypothetical. “Did you know that every angel’s grace feels different? Not really a physical sensation; sometimes it’s a frequency or a vibration but we can sense the difference. It’s also how we can recognize each other’s blades, each one is distinct and marked with the grace of that angel.”

“I didn’t know that--wait, the angel blades me and Sam use, you can tell which angel they belong--belonged to?”

“Yes. It’s how we were able to identify them after battle. Sometimes the owner of the blade was too…wasn’t recognizable anymore.” Castiel switches the glass back and forth between his hands. “But the blades always were. Of course some blades like an archangel blade are immediately distinctive.” The corner of his mouth lifts a little in remembrance. “You remember Gabriel? His grace always felt a bit like the ions between gases in a nebula.”

“I...have no idea what feels like.” 

“Oh. Let me compare it to something more familiar. What’s the name of that clear drink? The bubbly one?”

“Sprite? His grace was like bubbly water?” Dean almost chokes on the whiskey through the laughter bubbling up. “Oh man, that explains a lot.”

“Raphael’s was like static on a sweater. Lucifer’s was frigid, of course. The burn of breaking an icicle with your bare hands. Michael--there was a pressure to his, like being held underwater. It was weighted.”

“Your family is weirder than mine, man, I’ll give you that.” He’s still laughing, half shaking his head, half rubbing his eyes. “I can’t imagine how annoying that would be. Like if Sam gave me salad vibes or whatever every time he was in the room I’d have thrown him out by now.”

“I doubt you could get rid of him that easily.”

“Be damned if I didn’t try. Hell he wouldn't be able to put with whatever grace-vibes I'd give off. How did you guys manage?”

Castiel sits silently for a minute, a dip in his brow before he starts talking again. He doesn't answer the question, either. “Anna. Hers was like a forest creek. Zachariah’s burned, but not like fire. More like…” his nose curls up and then his eyes brighten. “Ah! When the water suddenly comes on too hot in the shower.”

He’s trying to think of other angels, Dean realizes.

He’s going to be running through a list of the dead.

“Balthazar…Balthazar was like the hum of a fork hitting a wine glass. Naomi, she was like a midnight rain. You’d shiver just hearing it fall. Samandriel.” He pauses. “The brightness of a tree’s first green leaves. Metatron’s was serrated, the edge of a chainsaw, maybe, is a close comparison. Bartholomew, a sliver of freshly cut glass.”

“ _Cas_ ,” Dean mutters. “ _Stop_.” He can’t listen to this. It’s too raw, it’s flaying him to hear how much Castiel remembers his siblings and the distinctive memory of them that always ended up being washed in blood. There’s not a single living angel on the litany that Castiel continues to go down.

“When I had Theo’s grace in me and later Adina’s, it was like listening to something sung backwards and never being able to understand it. It felt like an endless wrong. And Hannah. Oh, Hannah.” His eyes drift far away. “Like a butterflies wing beat.”

Dean reaches for the bottle even though his glass isn’t empty.

Castiel stares at the table as he utters the next name: “Israfiel.”

The bottle in his hand shakes, sloshing more liquor into the glass.

“When they added the sigils to the trap I was in, it bound my grace to the point where I couldn’t feel my grace enough to recognize their grace signatures. So I relied on my memory of what it felt like to tell them apart. Maribel’s…” he suddenly seems to remember what Dean said a minute ago and pauses. “Do you want me to stop?”

 _Yes._

“No, of course not. You were saying?”

He picks up in the wrong place. “Israfiel was like needles. Inserting a hundred at a time, again and again.” He’s are holding the whiskey glass so carefully that Dean’s sure he’s fighting the urge to punch his fingers straight through the tempered glass. “This week I started to feel that again.” His breath hitches. “Whenever I’m around you.”

“Whenever--you mean like right now?”

Castiel stares up towards the ceiling, trying his hardest not to blink. “Yes.”

Suddenly Dean understands why Castiel first stepped into the room. Why he took the offered drink and told a story about the secrets of his species. Why he went down a list long enough to give himself time to summon the courage to ask the one question he came here for, the one request he’s never been able to bring himself to make until now.

Without a word Dean gets up and goes to the infirmary. He stops by Sam’s room to tell him what’s happening.

“It’s different this time,” he says. “I think he can tell when it starts happening. He’s still with us, but he’s also starting to feel the other reality at the same time.”

Sam dips his head forward, kneading his eyes with the back of his hand. “Forty days,” he sighs. “I thought it was really over this time.” He looks up blearily. “Do you need help with--”

Dean shakes his head. “I’ll do it.”

When he comes back with the syringe Castiel is still sitting there in front of the undrunk whisky glass. His fingers are wrapped taunt around it and he doesn’t look up.

Dean slips into the chair beside him and waits. He waits until Castiel moves and starts to roll up his sleeve. There’s none of the rigidness that usually accompanies the switch, but the clarity seems to unsettle Castiel even more. His fingers fumble with the buttons on the cuff and Dean takes over the third time he can’t push the button through the hole. 

When Dean pulls the fabric up his arm and finds a vein Castiel turns away. Dean knows that this time it’s not because of what he thinks is happening but because he knows exactly what’s happening. The angel closes his eyes, but the glare of the overhead lights still glisten off the tear tracks running down to his chin.

“Cas,” Dean says softly. He doesn’t know how to tell him that it doesn’t matter that he still needs help, that he’s not whole. He doesn’t know how to tell him how proud he is of him, how immensely fucking proud.


	25. Twenty-Five

They find themselves in a warehouse.

“It’s a greenhouse,” Sam corrects Dean and his brother rolls his eyes exaggeratedly.

“We’ve killed vampires in places like this,” Dean grumbles.

“I doubt there’s any place you haven’t killed something,” Castiel observes a little too loudly.

Mary covers her mouth to hide her laughter.

“What about the beach? Come on, Sammy, I kept telling you to find us a case on the coast.”

“You hate flying! And you’re a slow swimmer.”

“One, I have a car, and two, we’re not doing laps in the ocean are we? I can keep my head above water, what else do you want?”

“Mary Winchester?” The florist approaches them holding a clipboard to her chest. She has dyed blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and stern round glasses framing her young face. “Your order is right this way.”

“I don’t know if I can swim,” Castiel wonders as they follow the florist to the back of the greenhouse. “I believe Jimmy could, but he’s not in here anymore.”

“Muscle memory, dude,” Dean pats him on the back. “You’ll be fine. Plus you’d look great with a tan. Ladies dig that, I’m telling you.”

“Angels can’t get tanned,” Sam and Castiel say at the same time.

When they finally arrive at the corner where their designated purchase sits Dean’s first reaction is to raise his eyebrows and look at Mary. “ _Pink_?”

“Coral,” the florist corrects him.

“Peach,” Castiel says. 

“This guy’s probably right, he’s like a million years old, he knows his stuff,” Dean grins, elbowing the angel.

“Actually I am more than three mill--”

“Thirty! Thirty-three,” Sam pipes up quickly when the florist starts to give them a strange look. “Should we bring these to the truck?”

Dean had refused to bring the Impala along for this trip. “It’s your idea, Cas,” was his defense and Castiel quickly passed the blame on to Mary.

“She wanted it,” he argued.

“We both did,” she shot back, looking from one of her boys to the other. Their expressions remained impassive until she threw up her hands in defeat. “Okay, fine, it _was_ me, but I told Castiel to ask you because you can’t refuse him.”

That’s how they end up putting three crates of peach roses in the back of a rented truck. Sam suggested picking a van, but Dean insisted a truck was the lesser indignity. Mary adds a bag of gardening tools to the side before latching the gate shut on the truck bed and Sam declares that since the truck isn’t theirs he gets to pick the music for the ride home.

They have the garden set up in time for Claire to comment on it the next time she stops by the Bunker. “Since when do you have a garden?” she remarks when she sees Mary washes her dirt-covered hands in the kitchen sink, a tangle of uprooted weeds next to her on the counter.

“It’s a work in progress,” Mary admits. “But hey, I’ll clear the kitchen if you want to start baking.”

Claire’s made a point of coming by the Bunker more often; sometimes she’ll join up with Mary and the boys for a hunt and then tag along for the ride back to the Bunker on the condition that they let her do her post-hunt baking undisturbed. Only Castiel gets to enter the kitchen once she’s started whipping up a storm; she’ll fill the ovens with pies and muffins and shortbread and Castiel will be there helping to whisk egg whites and clean the burnt edges off baking pans.

“That’s how you repay me,” Claire jokes once, hands dusted with flour as she rolls little balls of white chocolate macadamia nut cookie dough.

Beside her Castiel freezes, the baking paper fluttering from his hand. “Claire,” he says, looking at her with those eyes of endless sorrow. “I know I never can.” 

She can’t help but laugh. “Castiel, how many times have you died?”

The question makes him blink. “What did you say?”

She pinches the last ball in the row and pulls over the next oven tray. “I know you’ve died before. How many times?”

He grabs a paper towel to wipe up the spillage from the flour bag as it tips over. “Four. But two of those times it was my own carelessness.”

“God, you’re impossible,” she mumbles. “Okay, for the sake of this argument I’ll run with that. You died twice then. And both those times, did you die to save the world?”

“Well yes, but--”

“Yes. Not buts. You've saved the world at least twice, more than that if you asked Sam or Dean but at least twice. And I’m part of the world.” She leans over, trying to get him to look at her instead of the counter he’s studiously scrubbing. “You already saved me twice, Castiel. You don’t owe me anything.”

His hand pauses over a particularly stubborn spot of spilled honey. She can see him wrestling to accept even the notion of absolution, the tempest still raging in his eyes. Finally he turns and presses a kiss to her forehead.

She hides her grin by headbutting him in the arm. “We need another oven tray,” she remarks, returning to her careful line of cookie balls. “Let’s put raisins in some of these, too, so we can see Dean can make _that_ face again.”

Castiel tells her “thank you” before she leaves and it still sounds like “I’m sorry.” He stopped apologizing after Claire told him not to, repeatedly to the point of almost having to beg him to stop. Now it seems the only effect her remonstration had was to make him change the notes of the same melody; it’s the way he says “ _thank you_ ”, the way he lowers his head before uttering the words and the solemnity of his voice that makes it echo with lingering guilt. Sometimes he’s practically covert about it, sneaking it in as a bare whisper when she hugs him goodbye or a murmur slipped before she rolls the car window up. Like he understands that she doesn’t want to hear it anymore but he's compelled to say it anyways.

He moves now to put her duffle in the back seat and before she opens the driver’s door she bumps her nose against his shoulder and breathes “I love you.”

“I don’t understand,” Castiel confesses to Mary a few days later, explaining how the tiny words that Claire offered him have puzzled him. “I love Claire but it doesn’t make sense for her to love me. She _can’t_. Not after everything I’ve taken from her. It’s not possible.”

He’s squatting beside her in the dirt, watching her weed the rose garden. More than once he’s offered to get rid of the weeds but Mary insisted on doing this on her own for once. The roses are a family joke by now; everyone knows the garden only flowers when Mary wants it to, which is when she gets too frustrated and asks Castiel to do something with his “mojo”.

“It’s love, Castiel. You don’t have to understand it. Just like you don’t have to completely understand someone to love them.” The tip of the spade pushes into the moist soil and she uproots another wiggly plant. “You know that we love you, too right?”

He nods. “Of course.” There’s a confidence to his answer now that wasn’t there before. It’s taken awhile for him to reach this place; and for them to realize that Castiel understands love as something he gives to others, not something he can receive for himself. So they’ve made a point of telling him it more often now, in words, in a hand on the shoulder or look in the eyes, but mostly in _words_. They are writing it in an ink that can’t fade and they are engraving into the palm of his heart that he is someone they are choosing to love.

Mary is about to dig up the next row of weeds when she notices it: a small pale rose bud sprouting all of its own between the briers. The blossoms Castiel makes bloom are always full in a moment; this is a natural bud.

Castiel beams at her, a wide goofy unabashed grin, and she realizes he must have kept the bugs from eating this one.

It doesn’t take long for the entire garden to burst in untethered glory.

“But who’s gonna water them when we’re out on hunts?” Dean complains. He actually enjoys seeing the pink--peach-- _whatever_ blossoms waving in the breeze when he comes back to the Bunker. He doesn’t want to drive up one day and see them dangling head down and brown.

“The sky,” Castiel replies solemnly; in the middle of Dean’s question about if the angel can actually make it rain Sam holds up a sprinkler system he bought from the hardware store.

“He can’t actually control the weather, though, can he?” Sam asks when they’re tightening the screws on the sprinkler.

Castiel starts a detailed lecture on the extent of angel powers only to suddenly tamper off. Sam nudges Dean with his foot and they both look over to see the angel staring frostily in Dean’s direction, his shoulders hunched defensively and a scathing “ _you_ ” crossing his lips.

They know the routine. Dean silently motions for Sam to take this one. Dusting his hands free of dirt, Sam hops over the fence and goes to stand next to Castiel with a hand on his shoulder and wait.

They don’t use the spell injections anymore; by now, almost three months after the curse was removed, the recurrences are frayed enough to Castiel to recognize the difference himself. These days the recurrences tend to only last a few seconds, or at most a minute or two, before Castiel returns to their reality. “It used to completely replace you with them,” he explained a few weeks ago. “But I can tell when it’s happening and I can try and see through it. If I focus hard enough it goes away.”

Each of them develop their own version of a tether to help pull him back. Mary repeats her own name, her full name, “Mary Winchester”, to help him return whenever he calls her Maribel. Dean looks him in the eye and calls him “ _Cas_ ” until his vision relaxes. Once Castiel started screaming and backpedaling away in the middle of making dinner. Dean could only reach for his ankle and at the touch of Dean’s fingers the angel abruptly clamped a hand over his mouth, face flushed red like a student embarrassed for using a bad word in front of a teacher.

Castiel also finally wins them over on the decision to pack a syringe of the angel sedative in the trunk. They tell each other privately that they’ll never use it, but it’s the only way the angel will agree to leave the house on hunts with them.

But of course even then it’s not enough. Without the spell injections to guarantee a stable return to reality Castiel is even more unsure of himself. “What if the recurrence happens in the middle of a dangerous situation? You can’t wait to try and shake me out of it. It would be putting you or Sam or Mary or anyone’s life at risk!” To punctuate his declaration Castiel holds up a small syringe-like object.

“Is that...an epipen?” Sam asks. “Where did you get that?”

“Claire bought it for me on the electronic bay.” Castiel can’t help but look a little proud of himself.

Mary raises an eyebrow at the boys. “That’s a good idea. It will be easier to explain. People have allergies.”

Despite Dean’s objections, Sam fills the epipen with the sedative. After a few days Sam notices that Castiel is carrying the epipen around with him, the obvious lump sitting in his right coat pocket even when he’s not on hunts. Sometimes during conversations Castiel will slip a hand into his pocket and feel for it, as if reaching for his own private reminder of where he is right now and who he’s with.

Sam remembers how for the first few weeks even after the hallucinations of Lucifer were gone his finger would slide back to the scar in his palm when he was running low on sleep or pulling a shift of all night research. Dean pretended to not notice, but Sam knew that he saw the hidden movement and chose to say nothing, understanding that sometimes silence can be it's own form of compassion.

Castiel takes to cataloguing the Bunker’s archives with Sam. It’s a tedious job consisting of hundreds of files and dusty artifacts, but it’s also necessary if they hope to find some kind of device to detect Lucifer. The angel is convinced that with all the experience the Men of Letters have they must have something to track down one runaway archangel.

One afternoon Sam comes into the storage room only to see Castiel immediately drop the folder he’s holding. The angel’s eyes widen in familiar dread and he rolls up his sleeve and holds out an arm, face turned away.

Sam approaches him slowly. He folds the sleeve back down one inch at a time until it hangs back back down. 

“You’re going to take me apart again,” Castiel says stonily. “I’ll take the hellfire if you don’t mind.”

The sleeve bunches up again and Sam tugs it back down. He stands at his side, arm almost touching Castiel’s, and waits. He waits through the next line of insults wrapped around pleads for hellfire, _not the blood, please, anything but the blood_.

It doesn’t usually go on this long, not anymore.

After the third time the angel demands hellfire Sam thinks he might be standing here all morning and shifts his feet into a more comfortable position. Every time Castiel hikes his sleeve up Sam clips his finger to the hem of the fabric and drags it back down.

The tension beside him finally uncoils after the sixth time. Castiel stops mid-sentence; “you deprived soul of hell-- _Sam_. Oh.”

Sam exhales a quiet sigh of relief and expects the angel to move on but Castiel remains rooted in his place, eyes pinned to the ground as a slow burn crosses his face. He remembers now, Sam belatedly realizes, what he says and does during a recurrence. Shame is hard to hide, even for a celestial being.

“Thank you,” Castiel whispers to his feet and Sam blinks away the sudden tears in his eyes.

“You don’t have to say that, Cas. You never have to. Not to _me_.”

The words prompt Castiel to look up. “Sam. You can’t keep blaming yourself.”

A laugh escape Sam’s lips. It’s funny how Castiel phrases it, as if he had a choice to let the guilt soak into him or not. As if every recurrence and fear-soaked memory of torture didn’t already have his name tag fluttering off the collar.

He senses arms reaching around his back and realizes that the angel is hugging him. He holds him back, too tight and too long and it feels whole.

The roses all die next week.

Mary collects the petals to dry for tea. They don’t have time to go buy new seeds; Rowena has found a spell that, combined with the Men of Letters tracking device Castiel found, should work on a specific consecrated ground in Maryland to summon Lucifer. It’s a combination of unlikely factors and long shots that sums up one of their usual attempts.

Dean finds Castiel sitting outside in the barren garden the evening before they’re set to make the nineteen hour drive there. He’s perched on a wooden bench Sam and Dean “totally didn’t” steal from a haunted house they took care of the week before. Hands in his pocket and eyes fixed on the withered plant stems, Castiel doesn’t notice Dean until he’s right next to him.

“Trying to resurrect them?” Dean quips.

“No. They’re already dead.” The angel leans back, squaring his shoulders against the back of the bench. “Besides, winter is coming. Roses don’t grow in winter.”

Dean slides down next to him and leans forwards, arms on knees. “You don’t know that. Sometimes nature surprises you.”

The sun’s already starting to set earlier. The wind is a little harsher, whistling just a bit too shrill and sharp as it cuts through the trees lining the road ahead. Winter is coming early this year and Dean mentally reminds himself to check the Bunker’s heating system before the first cold wave hits. 

Castiel pulls his hands out his pockets and folds them in his lap. Dean can see the outline of the epipen in his right pocket between the rumpled folds of the coat.

Castiel looks at Dean like he’s about to remind him how much he knows exactly how floral cycles go but then a soft smile crosses his face and he nods. “You’re right. You never know what can survive.” He stretches his legs out and lifts his face to the darkening sky. 

It’s too early for stars to be out, but Dean’s sure that Castiel can find them anyways. “See anything?” he wonders, following his gaze above.

“Not yet.” Castiel’s eyes are sapphires to the encroaching night, like a beacon to any wandering stars looking to find their way home.

The sky yawns above them like a chasm, darkness stretching across it thicker with every passing moment. Dean thinks about planets hiding beneath the covers of the atmosphere and if the angel has ever been to outer space. They’d have to borrow a spaceship to go and bring him back if Castiel got lost out there. He’s pretty sure Crowley owns at least one space station. He wonders if he’d hate space travel as much as flying. He knows Sam would love it; his mom, she’d be part fascinated, part speechless.

He wonders if there’s any corner of the universe God would dare to create where they wouldn’t travel to find each other. 

* * *

_You darkness from which I come,_

_I love you more than all the fires_

_that fence out the world,_

_for the fire makes a circle_

_for everyone_

_so that no one sees you anymore._

_But the darkness holds it all:_

_the shape and the flame_

_the animal and myself,_

_how it holds them,_

_all powers, all sight--_

_and it is possible: its great strength_

_is breaking into my body._

_I have faith in nights._

_-Rainer Maria Rilke_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for much everyone for enduring this long painful journey! I know it's not quite the tidy closure some of you might have wanted but I wanted it to reflect the reality of recovering from trauma and that it's a process not an event. 
> 
> This has been my longest project to date and I'm so proud of being able to share it with you all; huge thanks to my brother and [GalaxyThreads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GalaxyThreads/pseuds/GalaxyThreads) who beta read this and helped shape it into the story it is today. If you love whump go and read GalaxyThread's [S12 fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26767333/chapters/65297113), it's simply amazing and an inspiration to me as a writer.
> 
> I'm going to have a longer one-shot set in s9 coming up soon, so stayed tuned. And my tumblr is also [angelfishofthelord](https://angelfishofthelord.tumblr.com/) if you wanna drop by to see my Cas edits or chat about Cas. Yes I make everything about Cas what of it


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